SA company Aspires to Dutch award

South Africa’s Aspire Solutions, which specialises in spatial business applications, has helped blue-chip Dutch client ANWB win the weather and traffic category of Holland’s annual Website of the Year awards against competition that included Google Maps.

The award ceremony, based on over 864,000 votes received from members of the public, was held in Amsterdam on November 14th.

Over 50% of Dutch adults are members of ANWB, an affiliate of the global Automobile Association, says Aspire MD Mike Steyn. ‚”It’s a very popular and high-profile company and their website is a big part of that. The trip planning page brings together live traffic and weather data with information about road works, speed camera locations and traffic modelling data to provide an incredibly valuable resource.‚”

The site can get up to a million visitors a day during peak periods, says Steyn. ‚”People can access live transport data for the whole of Europe or for the nearest intersection, all in real time.‚”

Aspire worked with global navigation company TomTom and local partners MapIT and AAT to provide the platform and data that powers the ANWB site’s user-friendly trip planning application. ‚”We give ANWB’s front-end developers a single combined data feed that makes it easy for them to slot it all into the web page. A lot of heavy lifting happens behind the scenes to compile all the base data and to manage the workloads,‚” says Steyn.

‚”The scale and sophistication of the project is beyond anything we’ve done in South Africa so far,‚” adds Steyn. ‚”We’re processing huge volumes of visitors, hits and data we poll TomTom’s main traffic service every two minutes to ensure the site is always up to date. Combined with high visitor numbers and strict uptime requirements from our client, it represents a significant technical challenge.‚”

Steyn says Aspire ‚”is very proud to have played a key role in the team that’s made ANWB traffic such a success.‚”

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