Geo.me Reduces Customers’ Annual Geospatial Costs by up to 90% Using Amazon Location Service

Geo.me was founded in 2008 and delivers location-based applications that provide geospatial web services like routing, geofencing, tracking, placing points of interest, and storing geolocation data for enterprises in the B2B sector. It does this in two ways: First, it builds digital mapping applications that take an asset or customer’s location, including route, and render it onto a map to provide information on where the customer or asset is located at any given time. This includes truck routing, asset tracking, and locating specialized refueling stations and residential addresses on a map. Second, the company provides the capability of storing geocoded records for future geospatial calculations, assessments, and analysis.

Each month, Geo.me serves around 120 million API calls. Handling millions of geolocation records requires a system that can store geocoded records or use geospatial capabilities like routing, tracking, and locating points of interest to improve delivery times by optimizing the routing of vehicles.

As an AWS Partner since 2014, Geo.me had the opportunity to be an early adopter of Amazon Location Service. Because the service includes routing, tracking, geofencing, stored geocodes, and other managed location data services that Geo.me offers to its customer base as a service, Geo.me did not need to create its own solutions. Such efficiencies aligned with the company philosophy of using recognizable, managed services. This philosophy makes the best use of Geo.me’s resources and has earned the company credibility with its customers. “We decided very early on in our evolution that we would always stand on the biggest shoulders we could,” says Stuart Grant, cofounder and director of Geo.me.

Because Amazon Location incorporates HERE Technologies and Esri and integrates seamlessly with other AWS services, Geo.me gained access to mapping, geocoding, geofencing, asset tracking, and routing data on a global scale. The company could accelerate application development by using other AWS service capabilities outside of Amazon Location Service to meet its customer’s needs.

Geo.me has helped European transportation customers plan and optimize delivery routes so that trucks can avoid roads that are narrow, unpaved, or otherwise unsuitable for heavy traffic. Using Amazon Location APIs, Geo.me clients can optimize routing to avoid roads where trucks are not allowed due to bridge heights and other regulations. By using Geo.me’s solution to plan reliable routes, customers can more efficiently meet their sustainability targets; for example, customers could identify usage opportunities for the 24 percent of European intracountry truck journeys that run with empty vehicles.

As for geocoding, “Amazon Location Service offered better terms of use than our existing solution, thus reducing annual geocoding costs for our customers by more than 90 percent while also removing onerous compliance processes from their workflows,” says Grant. Amazon Location Service transactional geocoding is a tenth of the cost of other providers, and customers can save even more by combining it with stored geocodes for frequently accessed addresses.

Using Amazon Location, Geo.me has saved time that the team can now spend on product innovation, such as adding sophisticated heuristic algorithms to optimize route planning. “Because Amazon Location Service provides building blocks like geocoding or routing, which are core to any geospatial service, we can now shift the focus to what we do with the data we collect,” says Grant. “We can now analyze that data and look at how more efficient heavy road transportation routes can be generated.”