Cloud helps the City of Madrid stay green, one tree at a time
15 September 2011
In this case study, you can read about how a Madrid based company has developed a cloud solution to enable its 17,000 residents help the city council maintain its 245,000 trees and keep the city green, with the help of an innovative SME – Tecnigral.
Tecnigral is a Madrid based company specialised in environmental services solutions for inner cities. Its ArboMap product for urban management has achieved great success with local authorities across Spain, especially Madrid City Council.
Tecnigral wanted to build a web-based solution to help Madrid citizens send requests to their city council to better maintain local tree growth.
The company had already built a web-based solution for the Madrid City Council called “Un alcorque, un árbol” (one tree pit, one tree) in 2006, but the underlying infrastructure was too slow and its interface did not deliver a compelling user experience.
The company sought a faster, more user-friendly interface for a solution that would be more secure and perform reliably when sudden peaks in demand occurred.
“We wanted a commercial solution whose performance would appeal to local authorities across Spain,” says José Javier García Doval, Director of Research and Innovation at Tecnigral.
To ensure an easily scalable platform, Tecnigral created the application using the Windows Azure platform, and used Microsoft Silverlight to deliver a compelling user experience. With the solution’s success at the Madrid City Council, it is now set for adoption by municipal authorities across the country.
“The Windows Azure environment offered the high quality of service we were looking for,” says García Doval, “It also delivered guaranteed service levels, as well as excellent security and availability. Every infrastructure component is replicated with Windows Azure,” says García Doval. “If there’s a failure in one machine, the workload passes to another in real time - giving a great level of stability.”
In July 2010, the cloud-based version of “Un alcorque, un árbol ” went to market. It was immediately adopted by Madrid City Council to help manage more than 245,000 trees around the capital, which are cared for by 300 employees from maintenance company Valoriza. Also, rapid scalability can cope with spikes in demand. “In the event of usage peaks, we can quickly scale up the Windows Azure infrastructure and go from 3 servers to 30 servers in just minutes,” says García Doval.
The solution’s compelling interface promotes rapid user adoption. María Sánchez Blanco, Head of Urban Tree Maintenance at the Madrid City Council says, “We expect around 17,000 residents to regularly help our team of 16 tree inspectors to maintain our urban environment.” García Doval adds, “Using the same Silverlight technology, we will deliver the application on Windows Phone 7 - further enhancing the user experience and increasing the number of participants.”
Tecnigral has helped authorities more effectively deliver on one of their major environmental goals - preserving trees while protecting residents.
Benefits of cloud:
- High Reliability, Scalability, and Security
- Reduced Development Time
- User-Friendly Interface
- Flexible Infrastructure to Drive Growth
Small & Medium Enterprises are the backbone of Europe’s economy. We work hard with governments and industry to ensure that SMEs get the most out of technology. Thanks to cloud computing that has pervasive benefits throughout the economy, SMEs can now exploit economies of scale, to rapidly expand their business and offer innovative solutions with less risk. This space on our website is dedicated to innovative European SMEs and the added-value of cloud computing to their businesses.
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