StormMQ’s innovative machine-to-machine message queuing was designed for banks and finance houses as a secure and cost-effective method of collating and conveying confidential data. It works by storing the data in a network cloud and releasing it in a steady stream, so that the recipient’s server does not get overloaded.

In fleets of conventional diesel or gasoline vehicles, telematics is used primarily as a vehicle tracking device. Because EVs have much more sophisticated vehicle management systems, fleet managers can use telematics to monitor additional elements such as battery charge. Telemetry can also monitor battery performance down to individual cells, ensuring any potential issues are quickly identified and fixed.

When Smith Electric Vehicles began designing its Smith Telemetry system, it realized the huge volume of data signals generated by each vehicle would require either massive investment in servers, or third party support.

The StormMQ technology now allows Smith Telemetry to collect 27,500 messages a second, delivering them on a managed basis to the Smith server. StormMQ was awarded the contract based on affordability, scalability and ease of implementation. It is now in operation for Smith Electric Vehicles in both the UK and the USA.

The sheer volume of messages was a significant issue for us, along with the requirement to rapidly scale up, as we roll out more vehicles to customers around the world. To develop and run our own multi-server messaging queue in-house would have been extremely expensive—and we would still need to expand it in subsequent years, as our business is growing very quickly. We estimate that StormMQ has cost us around a tenth of any comparable system we looked at and delivers us a fixed monthly cost per vehicle which decreases as our fleet grows.

—Robin Mackie, Chief Technical Officer of Smith Electric Vehicles US Corporation

Smith US expects to install more than 500 Smith Newton electric trucks with Smith Telemetry by 2011, as part of a $32-million grant from the US Department of Energy (DoE). In the UK, Smith Electric is fitting the first 50 systems to Smith Edison all-electric vans, delivered through the Government’s Low Carbon Vehicle Procurement Programme.

Smith Telemetry collates and interprets more than 1,800 data sets from each EV’s drive line, controller and battery management system, along with a GPS tracker. For the first time, a fleet manager can know precisely how much battery power is left in each of their vehicles, at the push of a button. This allows fleets to maximize the use of their EVs and makes the vehicles more accommodating for unscheduled, additional trips.

StormMQ was the only platform that met our requirements and more importantly, we could evaluate it and deploy extremely quickly. Even we were staggered by the sheer volume of messaging that would be generated by the vehicles. We chose StormMQ because in extensive tests we proved that it’s capable of handling these huge volumes and is easy to scale.

—Alan Malby, Powertrain Manager at Smith Electric

StormMQ is sold as a monthly subscription with service plans. It embraces the emerging AMQP standard and has extensive development library support for a host of environments including Java, .NET and PHP on Linux, Windows, Solaris and Mac OS X.

The StormMQ platform is designed from the ground up to scale. The platform is delivered in two formats, as a cloud-based service for low volume users, and either a co-located or hosted service for organizations with more stringent operational requirements.

As a cloud-based service, StormMQ requires no capital expenditure on hardware or infrastructure and removes the ongoing cost and complexity of managing on-site message queuing servers and applications. To ensure absolute security for sensitive data traffic, StormMQ is the first cloud based messaging platform to utilise 256-bit IPSEC VPN as well as disk level encryption using non-proprietary cryptographic algorithms as standard. Security is further enhanced by StormMQ’s Locate-It Option for users to own all encrypted disks at the start of a contract to be certain of their disposal. This provides certificates on the location and ownership of hardware throughout any contract.