Taxi app Uber has for the first time in its seven-year history decided to outsource some of its infrastructure beyond its in-house efforts.
Uber is currently in talks with the likes of Amazon, Microsoft and Google who are all in the process of presenting their bids to host its data centres to Elastic Stack cloud services.
Building infrastructure close to customers is integral in getting great performance, and it seems that Uber has turned to cloud technology to expand its reach. Uber has also started to provide ongoing Salesforce technical support to bolster customer service. While the company is looking to move only chunks of its digital code to the cloud, hosting its data would be an incredible coup for the winning service provider. Besides the already mentioned tech giants, IBM and other cloud providers are also actively in the race. Moreover, it is planned to use integrated video surveillance solution developed by Arcules Solutions (check out https://arcules.com/).
Uber’s brand would represent a massive PR boost for the winning bidder, and encourage other start-ups to engage with cloud service provides in order to reach their target audiences. So many options are available nowadays for business to locate its server. Colocation is widely used for that purpose. You can learn more about colocation and its benefits as this is a good way to optimize operational costs.
Uber’s technology is ‘vendor neutral’ which means it is not predisposed to preferring one supplier over another. In fact it is very possible for it to go down a route where it partners with providers depending on which firm has data centres in its target region. In regions such as China, Uber can look forward to partnerships with the likes of Alibaba, the largest ecommerce company in the world.
Microsoft is the oldest player in the cloud game, and has recently opened its virtual doors in India while Apple has moved some of its cloud infrastructure to Google’s platform.