Accounting for unplanned events

Working anywhere

Customers have been experiencing the advantages of Maptek Account licensing since 2019. They have embraced the working from anywhere model that matches business conditions and supports adaptable staffing arrangements.

Shandong Gold transitioned to a fully Maptek Account organisation in late 2020. Standardisation across their geographically dispersed business benefitted more than 550 users at 30 operations. The gold miner can view and manage software usage within their user base, with improved transparency around reporting and tracking support cases.

In 2021 a team of North American geologists visiting their Western Australian operations was unable to leave when COVID restrictions were introduced. Maptek arranged easy access to the necessary licences to continue key modelling tasks.

A large international mining services provider switched to Maptek Account in 2021 to access shared regional licensing. Fail-safe licensing for intermittent internet connectivity and borrowing facilities for working offline were other advantages.

Maptek Account allows licence administrators to create user groups to borrow licences for limited timeframes or for longer periods based on the nature of their work.

Working any time

On December 7, 2021 an 8-hour outage by Amazon Web Services (AWS) began at UTC 3.30pm and impacted cloud and other internet services globally. Customers who lost access to Maptek software were quickly restored through the global online licensing offered by Maptek Account.

The Maptek operations team in Adelaide, South Australia became aware of the issue almost immediately thanks to automated monitoring systems.

Within 15 minutes of the AWS outage, customer software was redirected automatically to a mirror of the Maptek Account service. After redirection had occurred the majority of Maptek Account users could use their software, essentially unaffected by the outage.

Some components of the system such as the sign-in page of the Workbench took longer to switch over to the mirror. This prevented some users from signing in to their Maptek Account using the Workbench. For these users it took about 2 hours before normal service was restored.

By UTC 11.30pm on the same day Maptek engineers were confident that the AWS infrastructure had recovered, and that all of our customers were experiencing normal service.

Troubleshooting

A few customers reported issues that appeared to be caused by local DNS caching, quickly resolved by rebooting the user’s computer.

Other customers were concerned about the number of online products affected and potential impact to Maptek Account after the initial outage.

Borrowing licences for offline use guaranteed they could keep using their software despite the ongoing situation with Maptek Account and AWS. This provided peace of mind.

Borrowing a licence for a day through Maptek Account was a good solution to intermittent network access.

Normal customer support conduits were maintained during the outage. Within Maptek, email and Slack channels were the primary methods for critical messaging. Slack had recently been implemented across Maptek globally, and when put to the test, performed well for frequent widespread updates to staff.

More customers are finding that Maptek Account meets their needs for flexible, secure application licensing. Product download-update services and technical support streamline user experience with Maptek applications.