United States Postal Service Optimizes Business Operations with Real-Time Visibility and Analytics from Kinetica
Kinetica, the leading provider of analytical in-memory databases powered by graphics processing units (GPUs), today announced that its success with the United States Postal Service (USPS) earned the world’s largest logistics organization recognition as a 2016 winner of International Data Corporation (IDC)’s HPC Innovation Excellence Awards. USPS has deployed Kinetica to optimize the operations of its several-hundred-thousand vehicles and employees, using visualizations and analytics of real-time data to efficiently deliver goods to the more than 154 million addresses across the United States.
Faced with the daunting task of managing the nation’s postal service with increasingly limited resources, USPS needs to continuously improve safety, efficiency, and services without overspending. The complexities and dynamics of USPS’ logistics have reached all-time highs, while consumers have greater demands and more alternative options than ever before; they require sophisticated services like just-in-time supplies, tracking and delivery updates, and dynamic shipment routing. Improving end-to-end business process performance while concurrently reducing costs requires the ability to make fast business decisions based on live data.
USPS implemented Kinetica, which merges the query needs of the traditional relational database developer with the scalability demands of the modern IoT-centric enterprise, to address this challenge. Kinetica’s proven success at organizations like USPS and the US Army has led to significant traction of the Kinetica database within the broader transportation and logistics space.
Incubated in 2009, the platform — then known as GIS Federal — was designed as a geospatial and temporal computational engine for the United States Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM) at Fort Belvoir. The in-memory, GPU-powered database was built from the ground up to deliver truly real-time insights on data in motion, and in the seven years since its incubation has been hardened into an enterprise-grade platform.
USPS went live with Kinetica in a five nines high-availability production environment in November 2014, and the platform hasn’t had an outage since. Today USPS runs Kinetica in a load balanced, distributed, multi-rack environment spanning numerous datacenters, running on HP Enterprise servers with Nvidia GPUs. The platform supports 15,000 concurrent users and ingests data from more than 200,000 scan devices.
“The HPC Innovation Excellence Awards recognize organizations that have excelled in applying advanced supercomputing technologies to accelerate innovation and generate ROI while benefiting science, engineering, and society at large,” said Kevin Monroe, senior research analyst at IDC. “USPS’ application of Kinetica enhances the quality of service that US citizens receive by giving them a better, more predictable experience sending and receiving mail.”
“We’re honored to have had the opportunity to partner with the US Postal Service and are humbled by the profound impact our technology is having on their everyday business operations,” said Amit Vij, co-founder and CEO, Kinetica. “This IDC Award demonstrates the tremendous value that real-time analytics and visualizations can have when applied to solve supply chains, logistics, and a range of other business challenges.”