Johannesburg, 04 Jan 2023
Think Wi-Fi is a telecommunications, advertising and marketing company working in the digital industry. Some of Think’s services include providing free uncapped Wi-Fi, designing and implementing customised Wi-Fi solutions for customers as well as building connectivity solutions with partners.
Think Wi-Fi started in 2018 and immediately made the business decision to invest in cloud solutions and scale their business from there. As part of their digital transformation journey, Think wanted to ensure that they were at the forefront of the latest technology. Think was a start-up technology company, making their primary concern maintaining cash flow in the early stages of their business. When choosing a cloud platform, the cost to run and maintain their products and services on the cloud was a key decision-making factor. They wanted the flexibility of being able to control their investment into the cloud, making a cloud platform with pay-as-you-go services an ideal choice.
Google Cloud Platform proved to be the most suitable platform for their requirements. Not only did Google Cloud have a fractional cost model, but it fit their long-term strategy while having accessible and easy to use tools and services. Google Cloud gave Think the option to only use the services that they needed, enabling them to control their costs and scale as needed. Google Cloud had a wide range of tools and services that Think needed to get their business started including - hosting, data storage, security, APIs, monitoring, virtual machines, interoperability between data, applications, services and security.
Some of the Google Cloud services that Think uses within their business include Google Workspace which offers a range of productivity and collaboration solutions, Looker for analysing trends, BigQuery for storage and query-analysis, Compute Engine, Google Cloud API services to enable communication across different service layers and applications, IAM, Cloud Storage, App Engine and VPC. To move away from heavy infrastructure builds, Think have started using Google’s Kubernetes offering to break down large applications into smaller microservices which allowed them to speed up the response time of their services and ensure that their applications were running as efficiently as possible. Think work across a large portion of the Google Cloud stack to meet their architectural and infrastructure requirements.
When Think started their business, they sought out the services of Siatik as they required partners to help them build out their cloud strategy and assist on complex Google Cloud related issues. In early 2019, Think started their partnership with Siatik. Siatik helped Think come up with a strategy that was Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) compliant and they assisted Think on how to get started in Google Cloud, understand what is available and create their project. Marnus Kruger from Think believes that Siatk was an invaluable partner in not only their cloud journey, but in their growth as a business. Siatik were able to provide Think with a well-thought out cloud strategy and expertise on the ideal Google Cloud services to use for their business to meet their goals.
With the complexity of the products that they deploy to the market, Think believes that without Google Cloud their business would have struggled to grow and meet their client expectations. In using Google Cloud, Think were able to use various cloud services to drive innovation within their organisation, allowing them to stay on top of their competitors while keeping their costs under control. Since the start of Think in 2018, they are serving more than one million people per month across nine different provinces. Their services include collecting, storing, analysing and visualising thousands of metrics collected by their network. The scalability and high-performance capabilities of the cloud allows them to run over one hundred million transactions per month, and being able to process an average of 200 TB per hour. Even with their rapidly increasing performance and storage requirements, they are able to easily scale their resources on Google Cloud to meet the demands of their business.
Think is a purpose-based business that uses technology for local community upliftment and providing better opportunities to those living in informal settlement areas. During the COVID-19 lockdown when schools were unable to have in-person classes, Think were involved in a project to provide students in Blikkiesdorp, South Africa with free internet so that they were able to engage with their teachers, peers and do assignments resulting in a higher pass rate for schools in the area. Think’s free WiFi, has given students and residents in various communities digital opportunities.
As Think continues their cloud journey, they are looking to innovate and expand on their current products and services with Google Cloud as their Google Cloud service partner. Think looks forward to continuing their microservice-build approach using Kubernetes and exploring Google Cloud’s machine learning offering to look at how they can leverage artificial intelligence and big data analytics to understand their data. This will allow them to find opportunities to improve their efficiency and automate self-healing processes so that their services are running as efficiently as possible. Think believe that Google Cloud has become a key aspect in their business strategy helping them grow their business across South Africa, Africa and globally.
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