Quantic is a fast-growing startup that helps businesses streamline their operations by using a full-featured cloud-based point of sale (POS) platform, including devices carried around by staff. Initially, our company primarily focused on restaurant operations. We weren’t planning for the technology to become a standalone product. However, by 2015, the demand from other restaurants was so high that we decided to roll it out, extending services to retailers, grocery stores, hotels, mini marts, gift shops, car washes and other businesses. As workloads grew and customer portfolios expanded, the business had to navigate a wide variety of different rules, regulations and workflows for the different industries served.
The Challenge
Over time, as our business expanded to hundreds of clients, we outgrew our original NoSQL database. Our application needed to scale beyond what our existing database was able to handle. We also needed to provide customers with real-time data synchronization capabilities, which enable the replication of data across clusters located in different data centers, something our database didn’t support. On top of that, unplanned downtime hurt customer experience, while managing various clusters placed a huge strain on our developers. DevOps teams were forced to deal with complex database management issues rather than focus on software development.
Following a competitive evaluation, Quantic turned to Couchbase Capella Database-as-a-Service for a scalable and simple, yet powerful way to keep pace with an ever-expanding number of customers, products and features.
The Solution
Building a database in-house to support the needs of the company was out of the question due to the cost, time and talent requirements. The database, data syncing from cloud to edge and storage costs alone wouldn’t make sense for a business that’s trying to scale. After evaluating various databases, we selected Couchbase Capella on AWS for its high performance, multi-dimensional scalability and a flexible NoSQL architecture that developers found familiar and easy to use. The price-performance of Capella coupled with mobile support and developer-friendly features allowed customer applications to be available 24/7, even when network connectivity was down. Capella’s offline synchronization capabilities, paired with the flexibility of JSON and SQL++, ensured applications were always on and always fast. This made Capella an easy choice for the business.
Additionally, Capella simplified decision-making, allowing Quantic’s clients to grow their business by determining when to offer special deals based on historical sales data, all within a single platform. Through Capella’s high-performance indexing, reports can be generated faster, allowing customers to get the data they need, when they need it. With Capella, Quantic powers its applications, including tableside order placement and payments, customer management, couponing, QR codes, loyalty programs and fast checkout.
The Results
Once Capella was deployed, Quantic experienced an immediate impact on the business. Our customers need most applications to function in real time. From time tracking to sending orders to the kitchen via kitchen display systems, real-time communication is essential. This requires data to be synced quickly across the organization’s entire architecture. With Capella in our tech stack, the company receives instant updates and is able to provide a seamless end-user experience. Customers have uninterrupted access to data that has been aggregated over short or long periods of time.
The business also noticed that indexing speeds became faster, which made a substantial impact on reporting. And in some instances, query times were cut in half for end users.
What the Future Holds
Quantic continues to grow. The business recently developed a white-label POS platform, allowing other vendors to sell our services as their own. Through the white-label program, anyone, from an independent sales organization to a bank, can provide its customers with a solution that can grow its brand. Since the heavy lifting has been done using Capella, we’re able to expand our POS systems, while simultaneously helping partners expand their brands.
As the company scales and workloads balloon, Couchbase will help Quantic reduce database management efforts so development teams can focus on product enhancements to provide end users with a seamless experience.
Learn more about how Couchbase Capella on AWS enables Quantic to manage and scale the company’s growing workloads while improving the developer experience here. Try Capella on AWS for free here.