Blackline Safety optimized efficiency and output by investing in the cloud

Balancing growth with innovation

With an ever-expanding customer base and portfolio of solutions, Blackline Safety now manages more data than ever before, all of which needs to be processed in real-time to provide customers with insightful analytics. As a result of this rapid growth, Blackline recognized that limitations of its current architecture may arise if not proactively addressed. It needed assistance with Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform expansion to efficiently process data from a growing number of products in the field combined with a planned increase of data reported from each connected wearable.

Compounding Blackline’s challenge of managing a growing stream of data from connected wearables, 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic introduced new urgency for the project. Early in the year, Blackline collected client interest regarding its need for industrial contact tracing support.

While Google and Apple announced their collaboration efforts to support a comprehensive smartphone platform, these consumer devices were not certified intrinsically safe and could not be taken into refineries, power plants and many other industrial facilities. To keep employees safe and healthy in both office and industrial environments, Blackline leveraged its intrinsically safe employee wearables, along with cloud-hosted software and data analytics to provide automated reporting and visualizations to support contact tracing investigations in the industrial workplace.

“At Blackline’s stage of accelerated growth, it was becoming difficult to balance critical software innovation with the need to grow our team and simultaneously manage improvements to our platform,” said John Moura, Director, Software Development and Operations. “We knew that investing in our cloud infrastructure would support our next phase of growth, but it was critical to select the right partner with deep experience and a proven track record. We found that partner with Rackspace.”

Blackline realized it needed a partner with big data expertise that could help re-architect some elements of its current platform. Further, Blackline required additional resources in order to build out a data lake architecture that could support new industrial contact tracing reporting — a proprietary solution that required rapid development for a quick deployment to help keep workers around the world safe and healthy amid the global COVID-19 pandemic.

A key challenge of the project was discovering how to support the planned increase in the data flowing in from Blackline-connected wearables in the field. To better support its clients’ growing needs, including industrial contact tracing, the data rate from each wearable was required to shift from once every five minutes (when not in alarm), to once every ten seconds — a 30x interval increase.