The City of Ottawa depends on Sybase technology to deliver a software solution to monitor and manage bus performance in real-time and ultimately help citizens arrive at destinations consistently on-time by bus. Steven Lassey explains how his relationship with Sybase has been very positive from the outset, he worked with other vendors and Sybase to create this product from scratch, and Sybase have been very supportive all along the way.
http://www.sybase.com
[Video Transcript]
We were asked to provide a way for our service control people in the control room to monitor the on street performance of our bus league, which is about 1000 buses, with 800 running in peak periods twice a day. The primary goal of this project was to provide them with the feedback of where the buses were and how they were performing in relation to their schedule as well. The Solution Enterprises is a mobile data terminal that sits in every bus, that the operator can see and on that terminal they can see their route and their schedule adherence information; whether they are on time, whether they are behind or ahead of schedule. At the back end we have a database server, a redundant database server that collects that information and feeds it to the control room staff so they can view it in real time. We have two Sybase products as part of this project. We have Sql Anywhere, which provides the mobile database technology and the mobile data terminal, which contains all of the bus stop information, the route information and, of course the schedule adherence information. Plus all of the settable parameters for the system are contained in the Sql Anywhere database on the mobile data terminal. We also use Afaria to provide remote management capabilities for our staff to download new software, to change those parameters as we need to on the fly and to give us that insight into the remote devices. This project was a combination of efforts both by our in house staff and a third party company, a couple of them actually, XWave and Val Canada, and we worked in partnership with them to come up with a solution that would work for us and was easily supportable. We started off with a small pilot system running on twenty buses, not actually using the Sybase products at that time, and thats when we discovered some of the short comings of those other products. We asked our vendors to find us another more robust product that we could use as part of this overall solution and thats how we came upon the Sybase products. As far as Afaria is concerned, we had our staff look at a number of potential solutions and they found that Afaria was easy to use plus they could also see the capabilities of that product to manage other mobile solutions that the city of Ottawa had in its plans or currently in operation. The Sql Anywhere product provided us with the capability to store and set parameters remotely and provided us with the database capability we needed in a small form factor in a mobile data terminal because resources are limited in that device. Our relationship with Sybase has been very positive from the outset. We worked with our vendors and Sybase to build this product from scratch and they have been very supportive. We have received telephone support; we have received software patches and downloads with no problems whatsoever. I have to say that of all the vendors we deal with, and there are many, Sybase stands out in terms of their customer satisfaction. Since the solution has been in place we have seen the ability of the operation staff to visualize service, which was never something they could before. They always had to look at tabular information or text information. Now on a map they can how the service is performing across the city and are able to make changes in real time to accommodate traffic delays, weather delays, anything that happens to service so they can make sure that the buses arrive on time as our customers expect.
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2:26Ottawa, capital city of Canadaby bestnomads876 views
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