How MapmyIndia built much needed map-based COVID solutions and mapping & location APIs leveraging AWS Cloud

In August this year, the MapmyIndia Move app — developed by India’s first home-grown navigation and telematics company MapmyIndia — was awarded the Aatmanirbhar Bharat App Innovation Challenge for its solution that ensures hyperlocal discovery.

In 1995, when few had access to mobile devices, let alone online maps, Rakesh Verma and Rashmi Verma took a leap of faith and founded CE Infosystems, MapmyIndia’s parent company, and decided to put maps online.

Today, the company is serving over 5,000 enterprise customers, and has increased its product portfolio from maps to include APIs, navigation, tracking, analytics, GIS, GPS, IoT & location technologies. MapmyIndia says that 80 percent of all cars in India with navigation systems use their technology and that approximately 20 crore Indians benefit from its maps and technologies. MapmyIndia offers a comprehensive stack of various mapping and location APIs which is being used by hundreds of developers, tech companies and enterprise customers across industry verticals, not just for COVID but also in their consumer apps and enterprise IT systems.

From the outset, the company has made a fundamental choice of keeping its users’ privacy intact, and believes that the right way of conducting business is by delivering direct value to customers. MapmyIndia does not deal with personally identifiable information (PII) and does not exploit any user data for advertising.

Building for safety and seamless functionality

MapmyIndia’s reach really came into play with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, when it developed a series of COVID-19 Tools & APIs including a public corona dashboard and guide which gives real-time information of nearby corona containment zones, testing and treatment centres, and on-ground hyper local corona and lockdown related issues people are facing. The corona-specific features along with the associated APIs, location-based analytics, geographical information systems, navigation and route planning, location tracking, and fleet and field workforce management has been of immense help to organisations and businesses function safely and seamlessly during the lockdown. Due to MapmyIndia’s pan-India hyperlocal presence, the APIs software/tools/APIs were leveraged to generate real-time location-based alerts across India at a micro- and hyper-local level to empower businesses to assess, visualise, analyse, and plan their strategies.

MapmyIndia has been partnering with government organisations as well as businesses across the tech, automotive, BFSI, FMCG, retail, manufacturing, logistics, and e-commerce sectors, among others, to help them deploy these tools and APIs.

The MapmyIndia COVID-19 Tools & APIs were also used to ensure the safety of organisations and employees. Organisations and developers have been able to seamlessly adopt MapmyIndia COVID-19 Tools and APIs into both employee and consumer-facing web and mobile applications. This made it easy to access crucial information about localised coronavirus-related restrictions, allowing them to plan their movements accordingly.

“We, at MapmyIndia, are committed to working towards helping Indian individuals and organisations combat the corona virus and come out safer and economically stronger in the face of this pandemic through our technologies and maps, which are more hyper local, intelligent, feature-rich and real-time. The lockdown may have come to an end but the threat is still there; hence we need to be on guard. MapmyIndia APIs generally and our COVID-19 Tools and APIs suite specifically help in Pan India Route & Location Safety Assessment vis-a-vis the evolving corona threat at a hyperlocal level. Organisations and users can map out all their business information and activities such as employee locations, office branches, outlets, and distribution and delivery routes. I am confident that MapmyIndia COVID 19 Tools & APIs will add immensely to the decision-making and operational capabilities of various organisations to resume the much-needed economic activity, while keeping Indians safe” says Rohan Verma, CEO & Executive Director, MapmyIndia.

MapmyIndia Location Stack - A developer’s delight

MapmyIndia’s maps are the most detailed, accurate, feature-rich, and continuously updated; offering an unparalleled map data for 3 crore+ places, including comprehensive house number level detail in urban areas, pan India village level details across rural areas, extensive coverage of points of interest across hundreds of categories, and the most precise road information covering 99% of India’s road network.

Today, scores of developers are switching to and using MapmyIndia APIs due to its enhanced map accuracy, technology capabilities, flexible costs, and customisable solutioning and support. MapmyIndia provides the best and most detailed interactive maps for India down to house address level in urban areas and comprehensive village level in rural areas. MapmyIndia’s geocoding, reverse geocoding, routing, nearby place search, geo-analytics, live location tracking, field work force tracking and IoT & Telematics APIs are all best-in-class and enable infinite possibilities of apps and business benefits for developers. Startups, large tech companies and IT departments of large corporates and government organisations, such as PhonePe, Yulu, Paytm, Grofers, Mercedes-Benz, McDonald's, Honda use MapmyIndia APIs and as a result, over 200 million Indians are benefiting from the power of MapmyIndia APIs.

Developers and organisations can easily sign up for these APIs and start using them for free at mapmyindia.com/api.

Scaling with the right cloud service provider

The MapmyIndia team says that they were able to scale at a short notice and build all the tools needed with ease on AWS Cloud.

“AWS is fantastic as a public cloud. We leveraged tools such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3), Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS), Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), Amazon Route 53, Amazon Athena, Amazon CloudFront, which helped us scale remarkably; deliver blazing fast API responses, and ensured our service availability is extremely high. Our customers are always happy to know that we use AWS Cloud,” says Rohan.

MapmyIndia began its journey with AWS Cloud in 2016. “The deployment took about five to six months, which was great considering the complexity of our technology. Scaling and performance optimisation has been a continuous, yet seamless, activity. Our cloud transactions and usage have without issues increased thousands of percent over the last few years. Today, we serve billions of transactions in a two-way manner. On one side, we listen and communicate with hundreds of thousands of IoT devices, besides millions of mobile phones and web browsers. We also run complex algorithms on extremely large data sets, based on MapmyIndia's maps for All India and our location-based technologies. All this is delivered easily and seamlessly to our users and customers,” he adds.

MapmyIndia’s customers are able to leverage superfast, fully scalable, highly available and secure solutions based on AWS. Hundreds of app developers including some of the largest tech giants, leading automotive OEs, government organisations and corporate customers across industry verticals have migrated to MapmyIndia since they moved on to AWS. “We are happy about our collaboration with AWS and the results that have accrued to us. The team at AWS is good in terms of giving us ideas and consulting on what we should look at next. The ROI of working with AWS Cloud is clear to us and we highly recommend AWS Cloud to other companies.” says Rohan.

Users can also download the award-winning MapmyIndia app from mapmyindia.com/move, for the latest updates on COVID-19, traffic, hyperlocal social discovery and a host of other features, and developers can sign up to start using MapmyIndia’s APIs from mapmyindia.com/api.