Urban Transit

THE CLIENT

Nimbler is a service that enables various companies to enhance communication during deliveries. It has a Slack-integrated web platform that offers real-time data, streams messages, and notifications. Drivers are given an app for reporting while customers are offered a private channel where they are notified about the delivery status and can easily communicate with customer support.

business challenges

One of the biggest challenges for Nimbler was the varying response time when the user requested new routes. Nimbler partnered with Zymr to solve this problem with a few iterative development steps that included profiling, tuning, refactoring, code-review, and bringing the response time to a consistent 2 to 4 seconds. The company wanted to build user-friendly iOS apps for several metro areas in the US, leveraging a common cloud platform that enabled social and transportation choices. They wanted this app not only to provide geolocation transit data to map out multi-modal transportation options and real-time feed integration with public and private transportation APIs, but also social sharing and personalization options through machine learning, multi-tenancy support, etc.

business impacts/key
results achieved

Nimbler developed an open and flexible SocialTech platform for urban commuters in the five largest metros of the United States for multi-modal, real-time, transit information. The company wanted to build its cloud apps and partnered with Zymr for its full-stack software engineering expertise, and in-depth experience in critical areas like cloud infrastructure, security, and orchestration. Nimbler realized the full value of transport networks by developing easy-to-use hyperlocal apps, that match transportation demand with supply across public transportation, shuttles, vanpools, taxis, bicycles, carpools, loaner cars, and personal cars form a large and complex network.

Strategy and solution

We built the entire cloud services with a set of highly-rated (4+ stars) iOS apps that were listed on the App Store with the help of our agile development process. Our team worked rigorously right from planning the overlay architecture of the cloud server, using advanced technologies and NoSQL DB, to building beautiful iPhone apps that provide real-time transit routes integrated with the public (subway, metro-trains, buses, ferry, etc.) and private transportation (bike sharing, shuttles, taxi-cabs, etc.) networks. We helped Nimbler in evaluating various open-source lightweight ESB frameworks like Mule, Finagle, Spring Integration, etc., in Cloud Middleware. We developed all the cloud services with a multi-tenancy social SaaS platform. Furthermore, we also evaluated various SQL and NoSQL DB options and then selected MongoDB. We delivered UX design services for iPhone apps, created a set of five iPhone apps, and continued to enhance them based on feedback. We developed a Jenkins and Maven-based CI process, used Git for the software repository. We provided extensive QE and end-to-end testing services. Our DevOps team delivered a comprehensive set of services which included the ability to deploy on Amazon AWS with secure VPC, S3 backup, and cloud monitoring services.