Case Study: iPass Inc. achieves real‑time, scalable Wi‑Fi monitoring and faster time‑to‑market with Databricks

iPass Inc. - Customer Case Study

iPass, founded in 1998, is the world’s largest wi‑fi network, serving 160+ providers and millions of hotspots across 140+ countries. The company struggled with an on‑premises Hadoop stack that couldn’t scale, while operating in a fast‑changing, unpredictable environment with unknown numbers of access points and highly variable security and performance—creating a need to analyze massive, real‑time data to monitor and improve user experience.

By moving to Databricks, iPass gained scalable, on‑demand processing for batch, streaming, machine learning and graph workloads, enabling rapid iteration and easier data exploration. In two months they ran 21+ billion scans, identified 100+ million hotspots, analyzed 500+ million records, cut time‑to‑market from months to two weeks, and launched the Veri‑Fi analytics product, which delivered $1M in new business in 2017.

iPass Inc.

Tomasz Magdanski

Director, Big Data and Analytics