Based in Germany, Saab Medav Technologies is a global provider of military and civil security products, services, and solutions for government agencies and other entities.
In the public sector, making the best decisions starts with fully understanding the situation at hand. To do that, decision-makers need access to all sorts of data, no matter where it’s generated or where it’s stored. And that access needs to be immediate—whether the individual is in the office, in the field, or halfway around the world.
To facilitate this data mobility and availability, Saab engineered the Information Fusion System (IFS), a platform that collects, analyzes, stores, and displays data from multiple sources into customizable reports. Decision-makers can then reference those reports—which are based on up-to-date information—to figure out the best path forward.
The basic version of the IFS includes several underlying databases that unfortunately add complexity and administrative overhead to the platform. This suboptimal configuration was slowing down the integration process, making it harder for decision-makers to add new information sources to the mix.
To overcome those challenges and build a stronger solution for its public sector customers, Saab Medav realized it needs to move to a new database that could support the entire product—regardless of how much data or new information sources were added. The right database would also be intuitive and extensible so that they could run analytics across large swaths of data, too.
Saab Medav Technologies finds DataStax Enterprise—and doesn’t look back
As the Saab team began looking for a solution, they came across DataStax Enterprise (DSE), a modern database solution built on the best distribution of open source Apache Cassandra™. Due to its flexible nature, Saab was able to easily add DSE Graph, DSE Search and DSE Analytics to DSE in order to build even more robust functionality into its IFS platform.
“What ultimately convinced us is the graph database’s capacity to start from a node and quickly query relationships and connections from there,” explains Bernd-Otto Wolf, a product manager at Saab Medav Technologies.
Their decision has already delivered huge dividends for both Saab and its customers. Now, instead of having to rely on multiple services from multiple vendors, Saab only needs to look to one vendor, DataStax, to deliver tremendous value to their customers.
What’s more, Saab customers can now analyze millions of records every day, and quickly, making it that much easier for them to make the best strategic decisions. No matter what’s going on underneath IFS, Saab Medav Technologies’ users only see one interface—eliminating any kind of learning curve.
“The new generation of products is our answer to the increasing requirements of our customers in the areas of information merging and processing,” Wolf concludes. “DataStax Enterprise technology provides the necessary scalability.”
To learn more about Saab’s journey to DSE, read the full case study.
