In the Maintenance Management Software (CMMS) and Field Service Management (FSM) market, the word "map" has become a commodity. Everyone claims to have maps. Everyone promises you can see your assets geolocated.
But there is an uncomfortable technical truth that few vendors will tell you: most of these maps are technological toys.
They work fine if you have 50 clients or 200 machines. But what happens when you are an energy services company, a city council, or a telco and you need to visualize 100,000 streetlights, 500 kilometers of pipes, or 20,000 manholes?
What happens is that the browser freezes. The map takes 10 seconds to load. And the user experience becomes inoperable. The problem is not your computer; it is the obsolete "marker" (pin) architecture used by 90% of the competition.
At Maptainer, we have opted for a Real GIS Engineering architecture based on Vector Tiles (MVT) and PostGIS. Here is why that technical difference changes everything.
The "Marker" (DOM Elements) Problem
When standard software (like Fracttal, UpKeep, or basic solutions based on the Google Maps API) loads an asset, it creates an element in the browser (a "marker"). If you have 1,000 assets, the browser manages 1,000 elements. It is manageable.
But if you try to load a medium-sized city's street lighting network (say, 30,000 points), the software tries to create 30,000 individual elements in memory. The result is a crash. To avoid this, this software uses "Clustering" (those colored circles with a number inside that group points together). The problem with forced clustering is that you lose context. You don't see the network; you see colored balloons. You cannot make real operational decisions.
The Enterprise Solution: Vector Tiles (MVT)
Maptainer does not play in that league. Our architecture uses Vector Tiles (MVT) served directly from a PostGIS spatial database and rendered with MapLibre.
What does this mean in plain language?
- GPU Rendering: We don't use the browser's memory to create "pins." We use your device's graphics card to "draw" the assets as if it were a video game.
- Extreme Speed: We can paint 100,000 points, lines, and polygons on the screen and move the map with a fluidity of 60 frames per second. No lag. No waiting.
- Data, Not Images: Unlike old maps that loaded static images (JPG/PNG), vector tiles send mathematical data. This allows pipe lines to stay sharp and text to rotate to always be readable when zooming in.
Why PostGIS Is the Brain You Need
Behind a pretty map, there must be a powerful brain. While others save location as two columns of text (Latitude, Longitude) in a simple database, Maptainer uses PostGIS, the world standard in spatial databases.
This allows us to perform queries that others can only dream of:
- "Show me all valves that are within 50 meters of this main pipe and haven't been inspected in 1 year."
- "Calculate how many meters of cable are inside the North District polygon."
These are not "maintenance" queries; they are Geospatial Business Intelligence queries.
Information Layers: The Power of Context
Managing infrastructure requires context. It is useless to see where your streetlight is if you don't know where the gas line runs or where the cadastral plot ends.
Thanks to our ability to inject WMS and vector layers, with Maptainer you can overlay:
- Real-time official Cadastre.
- Third-party utility networks.
- High-resolution orthophotos.
If your company manages assets inside an industrial warehouse, a pin map is enough. But if your business is on the street, managing water, energy, telecommunications, or urban service networks, you need firepower.
Maptainer is not just a CMMS with a map stuck on it. It is a Hybrid GIS Platform designed to digest massive volumes of data without breaking a sweat. Because when you manage a city, speed is not a luxury; it is an operational necessity.