Nomanini, a Cape Town-based mobile point of sale service specialising in facilitating cash payments in emerging market is now operating in six countries Africa in just four years with help of Google’s Cloud Platform.
Currently, Nomanini processes over a million transactions per month and attributes part of its success to its hard to miss hardware and getting the software right has enabled it scale into emerging markets across the continent in just four years.
Google App Engine, which is part of the Google Cloud Platform suite of products, is a fully-managed Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) that enables developers to build, test and deploy applications on Google’s highly-scalable and reliable infrastructure – the same infrastructure that Google uses to return billions of search results in seconds, serve six billion hours of YouTube video and provide storage for 425 million Gmail users.
Dale Humby, the company’s CTO, explains: “We don’t have to worry about database administration, server configuration, sharding or load balancing. And of course, the fact that it is cloud-based means that we only pay for what we use, so we can scale up during busy times of the day and down at quieter periods, like overnight,” explains Humby.
Today Nomanini processes up to 50 requests a second and, says Humby, “we’ve never had a problem with reliability, which, considering the vast amount of data we process is amazing.”
“On the technical side of things, we want to help our clients gain actionable value from their data. There are a number of ways we can do this, for example: each of our terminals is fitted with a GPS. By combining geo-location information with the number of transactions processed by each device, we can help clients monitor performance, identify areas where they would benefit from deploying more devices, and predict stock requirements for individual retailers
