About Windward

Windward is a global Maritime AI™ company that leverages advanced vertical and generative AI to transform the maritime domain. By automating global trade insights, mitigating risk, and detecting anomalies early, Windward empowers public and private sector organizations, including governments and federal agencies, with real-time visibility and predictive intelligence. With constantly evolving and highly dynamic datasets—ranging from GeoJSON to historical geospatial data—Windward provides mission-critical insights to support safe and efficient maritime operations.

Challenges

Windward originally relied on Rockset to power its analytics layer. However, following Rockset’s acquisition by OpenAI, Windward was notified that it would need to migrate off the platform within six months. This abrupt transition required a fast, reliable, and future-proof alternative to support its growing operational and analytical needs.

Given the complexity and non-standard nature of their data—which includes tens of billions of transactions combining analytical, textual, and especially geospatial (GeoSpatial) information with extensive use of polygons, aggregations, joins, and filters—Windward faced a unique set of technical challenges:

• Data Mutability & Complexity: Continuous updates to historical records and ingestion of diverse geospatial and structured datasets required exceptional flexibility.
• Performance Limitations: Their previous solution resulted in slow queries, often taking tens of seconds, falling short of the real-time insights Windward needed.
• Cost Efficiency: The company needed to optimize for both performance and cost, seeking a more financially sustainable infrastructure.
• Migration Urgency: The timeline imposed by Rockset’s deprecation necessitated a rapid evaluation, testing, and onboarding of a new solution.

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Solution

Windward launched a rigorous evaluation process, assessing close to 30 different analytical databases. Working closely with vendors, they created a detailed scoring framework based on hundreds of required features and capabilities. Over several phases—reducing the list from 30 to 20, then to 10, and finally to 3—they conducted in-depth proof-of-concept (POC) tests on the finalists.

Thanks to the combination of SingleStore’s powerful real-time analytics engine and Twingo’s (a Commit subsidiary) deep expertise, the joint solution ultimately outperformed all 30 contenders. Windward chose SingleStore and signed a multi-year agreement to deploy it as their strategic database platform. Twingo partnered closely with Windward through every step of the transition. Key areas of impact included:

• Optimized Cluster Sizing & Configuration: Infrastructure was tailored to Windward’s high-volume, high-complexity data needs.
• Query Performance Tuning: Strategic indexing, schema modeling, and performance tweaks drastically reduced latency.
• Cost Optimization Strategy: The solution offered better performance at a lower cost compared to the legacy stack.
• Unified Analytics Workloads: SingleStore’s hybrid capability enabled both batch and real-time analytics at scale.

Twingo's collaborative approach ensured Windward could unlock SingleStore’s full potential while accelerating deployment timelines and reducing operational risk.

Results

The migration to SingleStore, powered by Twingo’s hands-on support, delivered outstanding results:

• Sub-Second Query Performance: Complex queries that previously took tens of seconds now return results in milliseconds.
• Faster Time-to-Value: The migration process was completed ahead of schedule, thanks to Twingo’s execution agility.
• Operational Cost Reduction: Windward achieved significant savings compared to their former setup.
• Future-Ready Scalability: Their platform now supports massive, evolving datasets—including analytical, textual, and geospatial data—within a single high-performance environment.

You don’t need someone to say the obvious things, you need someone who can be there for you during the hard times, and provide you with deep answers, on things that would probably take you days to understand and figure out. I found not only a partner—I can even say almost a family. People who really care, who want to help and support you along the way. The Twingo team is a real partner every time we need to improve, optimize, or onboard new use cases.” — Benny Keinan, VP R&D, Windward