01 The Challenge
A national subsurface-mapping and utility-locating company digitizes what’s under
the ground — scanning and mapping buried utilities across the country. Its field
data was valuable, but it wasn’t yet a product. The company wanted a
customer-facing SaaS platform: an interactive map viewer, a digital
plan room for file and folder management, notifications, sharing, and subscriptions.
This was a true greenfield — no existing platform to extend, no architecture to
inherit. Everything from the tenancy model to the map provider to the billing
integration had to be decided, defended, and turned into work a delivery team could
build from. Leopard Data was engaged as Solutions Architect from the RFP
onward.
02 The Approach
Leopard Data designed the multi-tenant database schema — tenancy,
sharing, roles and permission types, and organization-group trees — along with the
KML/KMZ/GeoJSON-to-PostgreSQL ingestion design that turns field-collected
geospatial files into queryable map data. On top of that sat a microservice suite on
Azure AKS: a map-object service (~30 endpoints for lines, polygons,
markers, layers, features, and tracks), a digital plan room service, notifications, a
sync service providing offline mode for field crews, settings, tags, and blob file
management — with Azure AD B2C for identity and CI/CD built on
Terraform.
Platform decisions were made on evidence, not preference. We ran the Mapbox vs
Google Maps evaluation including real pricing quotes from both vendors, designed
the NetSuite, Workato, and Chargebee integrations for ERP, automation,
and billing/subscriptions, ran a WCAG 2.1 accessibility review, produced
the TCO analysis for the client, and presented the architecture at steering committees.
Architecture only matters if a team can build it. Leopard Data ran daily
onshore/offshore coordination, designed the work packages the offshore team executed,
ran the hiring pipeline — dozens of architect and developer interviews — and
delivered the ERDs and design documents the teams built from.
03 The Delivery
The platform went from a blank page to build-in-progress across web, mobile, and
microservices. The multi-tenant schema and geospatial ingestion design were
adopted as the foundation, the map-object service’s ~30 endpoints gave the web and
mobile clients a common geospatial API, and the sync service design gave field crews an
offline mode that survives spotty connectivity at job sites.
The commercial architecture landed alongside the technical one: the map-provider
decision was made on hard vendor pricing, the NetSuite/Chargebee/Workato integration
architecture connected the platform to the client’s ERP, billing, and support desk,
and the TCO analysis gave leadership a defensible picture of what the platform would
cost to run. The offshore team we staffed and coordinated was productive on the work
packages we designed for them.
