Digeiz is an AI software company that provides facilities generating high density foot traffic — train stations, airports, and shopping malls — with granular and rich audience measurement data. This technology allows the owners and operators to grow media and leasing revenues. They do so by leveraging existing CCTV cameras and artificial intelligence to create GDPR-compliant footfall insights. The company, which was founded in 2015 and is headquartered in France, has customers throughout Europe.
Managing distributed systems while scaling operations in 10 countries
In order to help the facilities’ operators measuring their audience, the Digeiz team installs on-prem servers in each of their customer’s IT rooms. The software on these servers uses artificial intelligence to process CCTV camera feeds in real time while measuring three different things:
- How many people go in and out of a store or walk by a store or screen
- How those people are segmented, e.g., across gender or age, or whether they visit alone or in a group
- How those people move from one store to the next and how long they stay in
“We re-identify people across different cameras from clothing appearance, without collecting sensitive data, like facial recognition,” says Julien Desmarais, co-founder and CTO of Digeiz. “We use colors and shapes to create anonymous vectors that can be matched. Someone who’s wearing red trousers and a yellow shirt is very distinctive. This way, our solution is fully GDPR-compliant.”
The rent level in the shopping malls is based on multiple factors, but the awareness and attractiveness of the brand is prominent. To get these brands, shopping malls’ owners accept a significant discount on the rent. They usually pay less per square meter than smaller brands. The logic is simple: Bigger brands attract shoppers to the mall, and those folks eventually spill into surrounding stores.
But how can a shopping mall determine the level of discount to give to a brand? And how can they tell whether that brand is actually contributing to the footfall?
This is one of the problems Digeiz solves by analyzing visitors’ patterns anonymously as they move inside the facility.
To do so, the solution requires significant computing and networking infrastructure. According to Desmarais, the average customer has something like 10 servers on-premises.
“We are deploying our solution across Europe — in countries like France, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the U.K., Ireland, Poland, Germany, and Austria,” he says. “It’s quite a lot of countries, and quite a number of servers per customer location inside each country.”
Finding JumpCloud, which seemed ‘too easy to be true’
As a Linux-based shop, Digeiz was accessing its servers remotely using SSH tools.
“It was getting really difficult because there were a lot of situations where some employees could access one site but not another,” Desmarais continues. “We really wanted to have a secure way to make sure that specific people on our team could access all of these machines — along with a way to remove access if we wanted. It was also important that the solution would be able to automatically monitor our infrastructure and alert us to any issues while unifying our tool stack.”
With so many machines spread out across such a large geography, Digeiz began looking for a secure solution that would enable the team to easily manage all devices in one place.
Initially, the team took the old-school approach to the problem and decided to move to Active Directory, enlisting the help of an expert to assist with the migration.
“After three months, we didn’t even have a proof of concept working,” Desmarais says.
Seeking a better way forward, Desmarais started researching options online and came across JumpCloud, the open cloud directory platform with cross-OS device management capabilities.
“When I saw JumpCloud, I said, ‘This looks quite easy,’” Desmarais explains. “I thought it was maybe too easy to be true and started testing it out.”
Deploying JumpCloud across the entire footprint in two weeks
Right away, Desmarais knew he made a smart decision. In just two days, Digeiz had a proven proof of concept. Less than two weeks later, JumpCloud was deployed everywhere.
“JumpCloud is so easy,” Desmarais says. “When you spend three months doing a proof of concept with nothing to show for it, you start thinking this problem must be very difficult. But at the same time, it wasn’t like our problem was super complex or uncommon. I thought there had to be an easy solution to this, and I found it in JumpCloud.”
Now, every time the Digeiz infrastructure team creates a new machine, there’s a JumpCloud agent on it.
“It’s so simple to get access to any machine we need,” he explains. “It’s easy to use and has strong security features. For example, you can remove access to a specific person or a group of users in one click. It’s just super easy.”
For Digeiz, JumpCloud makes it easy to demonstrate compliance — something that’s critical for a company operating in Europe and needing to adhere to the GDPR. If necessary, the team can effortlessly show that they are managing all of their devices properly. They can also report on all of their data should the need arise.
A responsive, flexible partner
In addition to the solution’s functionality, Desmarais has also had a pleasant experience interacting with the JumpCloud team, which has always been reactive and responsive to any questions or concerns.
“They were particularly helpful with pricing and giving us a flexible contract that enables us to increase the number of licenses we use as we grow over the next two years,” Desmarais explains, adding that Digeiz currently has more than 100 licenses. “We had a rapid discussion with the commercial team, and they set up a special contract for us. I could never have this kind of discussion with most companies. It was really easy to explain our specific needs and get a solution.”
What would Desmarais say to companies considering a solution like JumpCloud?
“For us, JumpCloud has been such a game-changer,” he concludes. “It’s a pleasure to recommend this product. I love it.”
Learn more about JumpCloud
“It’s so simple to get access to any machine we need. It’s easy to use and has strong security features. For example, you can remove access to a specific person or a group of users in one click. It’s just super easy.”
Julien Desmarais, Co-founder and CTO
JumpCloud changes the way IT administrators manage their organizations by providing a comprehensive and flexible cloud directory platform. From one pane of glass, manage user identities and resource access, secure Mac, Windows, and Linux devices, and get a full view of your environment.
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