Built for scale: how MapBI's platform keeps pace with its growth
MapBI's customer base was growing steadily, and its leadership chose to invest in the platform ahead of that growth. Working with Digitalis.io, MapBI rebuilt customer onboarding so that setup which once took weeks of senior engineering now takes under an hour, owned by its own operations team.
At a glance
- MapBI now brings a new customer onto the platform in under an hour, so a signed customer can be live the same day.
- Routine configuration changes take seconds and are made without a software release.
- MapBI's operations and product teams hold day-to-day control of the platform directly.
- Senior engineering capacity is now directed at new product features.
- Data isolation and single sign-on were strengthened, readying the platform for enterprise customers.
A growing customer base, and a decision to invest ahead of it
MapBI builds geospatial intelligence software for organisations that need to see and act on what is happening across a physical estate. The product has found its market, and the customer base has been growing steadily.
Like most successful platforms at that stage, MapBI's onboarding had been built by hand, customer by customer. Early on that is the right approach. It gives every customer exactly what they need, and it keeps the engineering team close to how the platform is really used. By the time MapBI was running sixteen or more customer environments, that same care was worth industrialising so it could be applied at volume.
MapBI's leadership saw the opportunity before it became a constraint. Rather than wait for onboarding to limit how fast the business could grow, they brought in Digitalis.io to design the next version of the platform's operating model while there was still time to do it carefully.
What we built together
Digitalis.io ran a three-phase engagement over three months, working alongside the MapBI team throughout.
We audited the platform. MapBI's team gave us full access and a candid picture of how the platform had evolved, which is what made a useful audit possible in the time available. The audit confirmed the platform was fundamentally sound and identified where the biggest gains were available.
We set the priorities with MapBI's leadership. The findings became a prioritised roadmap, built with MapBI's management rather than handed to them, so every item on it had a business reason attached and a clear owner.
We built it with MapBI's engineers. MapBI's engineers knew the platform intimately. Digitalis brought patterns from other platforms that had made the same move. Working as a single team meant decisions were made quickly and, just as importantly, the knowledge stayed inside MapBI. Five changes carried most of the value:
- Configuration became an operational taskSetting up a customer no longer waits on a software release, so operations and engineering can work in parallel.
- One authoritative place to lookPlatform settings now live in a single source of truth, which improves resilience and recovery as much as it improves speed.
- One path for every customerStandard tooling applies the same proven setup to every customer, making delivery predictable and repeatable.
- Safety built inChange history, protection against conflicting updates, a rehearsal mode that validates a change before it goes live, and daily backups of critical service data.
- A straightforward way backReversing a change is a configuration update rather than a redeployment, so the team can move quickly with confidence.
Each phase was validated in parallel with the existing setup before cutover, so the platform kept serving customers throughout. Alongside the technical work, Digitalis brought discipline to how work was tracked, giving MapBI management clear visibility of everything in flight.
What changed
| Measure | At the start | Today |
|---|---|---|
| Customer onboarding | 1 to 3 weeks of senior engineering | Under an hour |
| Routine configuration change | Code change plus a full release cycle | Under 30 seconds |
| Release cycles for routine setup work | One per change | None |
| Who performs onboarding | Senior engineers | Operations team |
Three things follow from that.
Revenue arrives sooner. A customer signed on Monday can be live on Monday.
Engineering builds the product. Routine onboarding and data updates are handled by operational staff using the new tooling, which returns senior engineering time to the roadmap.
The platform is ready for larger customers. A repeatable single sign-on approach is in place and data isolation between customers has been strengthened, both of which matter when selling into major corporate accounts.
The ongoing cost of running the new foundation is modest, and was recovered in full on the first customer onboarded.
Why it worked
Three months is a short engagement for a change of this size. It worked because MapBI committed to it properly: leadership made the priority calls quickly, the engineering team worked alongside ours rather than handing the problem over, and everyone agreed early that the goal was to move control towards operations rather than simply to make engineering faster.
“They were highly capable and skilled.”
What is next
The foundation is live and MapBI and Digitalis.io are continuing towards full self-service, so that provisioning a customer, adjusting settings and reviewing the audit trail all happen through a single administrative interface owned by the MapBI team.
Two further workstreams are running alongside it: a native mobile application built over the existing product rather than as a second codebase to maintain, and a front-end performance and user experience review that will shape the next wave of product work.
Planning for your own next stage of growth
Hand-built onboarding is the right answer when a platform is young. The question is when to industrialise it, and the best time is usually before it becomes urgent.
If you are weighing that decision, we will audit your platform and set out what the next stage would take.
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