Rip Curl rides the Big Data wave with Rackspace

Iconic Aussie surf brand, Rip Curl and digital marketing agency, VML Australia, have launched Rip Curl Search GPS, powered by ObjectRocket from Rackspace® Hosting (NYSE: RAX). This world-first surfing wearable technology enables Rip Curl to capture and analyse surf data, as well as refine its offering to customers through greater services and products.

The revolutionary Rip Curl Search GPS Watch captures data from a surfer’s session, including wave count, speeds reached, ride distance and session distances. Surfers then sync their watch to an iPhone, iPad, or desktop computer, re-living and sharing their surf experience on an interactive map. Surf data can be analysed in real-time and presented as summarised statistics for every wave, enabling surfers to gain insights into their performance and find areas of improvement.

Rip Curl Search GPS is backed and enabled by ObjectRocket, Rackspace Database-as-a-Service (DBaaS) for NoSQL MongoDB. ObjectRocket is a sharded and fully managed service for MongoDB, built with a set of tools and APIs designed to maximise uptime and reduce administration time for developers. Highly scalable, it allows customers to grow with their needs over time and scale up or dependent upon the demand they experience from their own customers.

“The capture and subsequent analysis of surf data presents endless possibilities and opportunities for us,” Shane Helm, global chairman – Watches and Equipment Division at Rip Curl comments, “Using ObjectRocket for Rip Curl Search GPS helps us capture data and provides deep insights into surfing patterns and behaviour. We can then offer improvements to the surfing community, as well as help refine our own offering to surfers.

“ObjectRocket allows us to scale based on our demand whenever we need to. If demand peaks or falls for the service at different times of the year, we have a solution that will automatically adjust with us and is managed by experts. It is highly cost effective with 10,000 users, 100,000 users or 500,000 users - wherever they are in the world”

Rackspace customer, VML Australia, designed, architected and developed the Rip Curl Search GPS ecosystem. Jeff Donios, technical director and architect comments, “ObjectRocket is the foundation for the ecosystem’s world-wide data storage and analysis. ObjectRocket and Rackspace enabled us to quickly figure out how to scale the application, allowing us to focus our resources on developing the core product and algorithms of the ecosystem. All the scaling, sharding and performance of MongoDB is managed by the experts at ObjectRocket and Rackspace.”

With the open source-based MongoDB solution, Rackspace broadens its portfolio to offer Australian customers a NoSQL DBaaS for big data applications. This offering is built upon hardware optimised specifically for MongoDB and easily accessed and integrated into existing systems.

Rackspace is an excellent option for the rising wave of cloud adopters, such as VML that want a trusted provider to help design and manage their cloud. Managed cloud offers them the power of cloud computing without the pain and expense of managing it themselves. This enables them to focus their scarce engineering resources on their core business, which is pursuing new products and customers.

“Having the right IT infrastructure to support wearable technologies such as Rip Curl Search GPS is critical to the overall success of the product. It is estimated that 30 billion devices will be in market by 2020[1], which will generate vast quantities of data. That data needs IT infrastructure that can capture, store, process and analyse, meaning that companies need to consider flexible, scalable IT solutions that can be deployed quickly and often in real-time,” said Angus Dorney, general manager, Rackspace Australia and New Zealand.

ObjectRocket further information
Customers are able to choose from a range of transparent pricing plans based upon individual data storage requirements, details of which can be found at (www.rackspace.com.au/objectrocket). Customers can also have a one month free trial when they sign up online.
Product information summary:
• Highly Available – Each instance resides on multiple redundant pieces of infrastructure, while databases are replicated and optionally exist in multiple geo-diverse data centres.
• Automatically Scalable –RocketScale™ technology inherently shards instances, enabling developers to automatically provision and manage instances. Customers can choose from a variety of plans to fit their workload – from one gigabyte to multi-terabyte scale.
• Consistently Fast Performance – The complete stack has been optimised specifically for MongoDB applications. The network stack, file system, OS kernel, and other resources have been configured to make MongoDB as fast as possible. All data is stored on redundant, blazing-fast Solid State Drives.