Chalo Leverages Snowflake to Revamp the Public TransportEcosystem in India

Chalo is deploying technology to digitize buses, which can unlock massive value for both passengers and bus operators, and hence, building a better public transport ecosystem.

The complexity or the dynamism of a transport business leads to complex analysis, reporting and visualization. And usually all of this is over varied data sets. Before Snowflake, the tools that you used were not delivering the right performance and price and compute elasticity at scale. So, given [that] data analysis is [an] important part of our business, right? It allows us to deliver a lot of value to our customers. We did evaluate a lot of other tools, platforms, products, right? And we assessed all of these over parameters like performance, quality of support, elasticity, scalability and we found Snowflake to be a clear winner across this set of criteria that we had. I would say Snowflake has made our journey faster from a data democratization perspective. It allows us to empower both our business teams and our customers [to] take faster data-driven decisions. So I think that's, I would say is, the key aspect.

If we had to do a complex query earlier, which had to combine and merge different data sets. It would take more than five minutes, on average. Now it takes less than half a minute. So a magnitude lower. There is a 10x performance gain. Similarly, when you process data at scale, usually you will end up with data inconsistencies. We have not seen any data inconsistency for a very, very long time. Similarly, from an efficiency perspective, while new reports, analysis, queries would take a few days earlier, now it just takes a few hours.

I think merging and querying varied data sets has become much simpler. Similarly, our efficiency to go and create these analysis reports, visualizations, has become much, much faster. And given Snowflake is a managed service, it has also reduced a lot of the burden on our platform team, allowing us to focus not on infrastructure, but on our core use case of analyzing data, generating insights and delivering it to our customers. We have also unified these data sets to create analysis, which is far more exhaustive and far more beneficial. When you talk about scheduling, there is a massive amount of demand, supply, customer behavior data, which has to be merged, and then it gives you an output. I think that's where Snowflake can play possibly the biggest role. I think, for us, growth and innovation are two important pillars, and there are two important teams, and I believe Snowflake is a great partner to support both our growth and innovation. That's how I would sum it up — on these two pillars.