See How Cloud-Native GIS Helps New Zealand Modernize State Highway Network

NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi (NZTA) is a New Zealand Crown entity responsible for managing the country’s land transport system. It oversees state highway maintenance and operation; state highway infrastructure design and delivery; and regulation of the network, including driver/vehicle licensing, road safety, and transport planning. NZTA provides services such as driver testing, vehicle registration, and toll payments. The agency alone contains eight business groups: commercial and corporate, customer and services, digital, engagement and partnerships, people and safety, regulatory, system leadership, and transport services. 

A small geographic information system (GIS) technology department meant staff relied on one common operating picture for all in-house GIS needs. The NZTA GIS team also supported emergency responders working alongside law enforcement, fire and emergency services, and outside contractors in times of need. But software maintenance, along with scaling and updating data across siloed systems and partner organizations, had grown inefficient and time-consuming. The team realized that with the demand for GIS growing across the organization, something needed to shift to realize its true benefits and outcomes.

“Emergency response highlighted opportunities to better connect data and streamline how tools are deployed. Improving that integration has helped reduce delays and support a faster transition into recovery,” said Peter Willoughby, platform lead for spatial at NZTA. 

Historically, funding settings and managed service arrangements meant an upgrade needed to be delivered as capital investments requiring a formal business case. This added significant complexity and ultimately left the organization locked into the same version for extended periods. 

At the same time, the high-availability environment proved difficult to maintain, requiring manual intervention. “Maintaining that resilience was challenging and, over time, became increasingly onerous,” said Willoughby.

NZTA’s long-term vision was to move beyond the centralized GIS team toward what Willoughby called “spatial as a service,” or decentralized GIS.  

“Our team had developed into a center of excellence, but we needed a resilient, scalable platform that enables the organization at scale,” said Willoughby. “Our system grew like wildfire—it filled up and reached capacity.” 

Willoughby envisioned a hub-and-spoke model that strengthens collaboration with external partners and allows teams across the agency to access, share, and use authoritative geospatial data. This would provide self-serve geospatial capabilities while maintaining governance, security, and standard operating procedures. 

“We had to scale our old system while still maintaining a single source of truth . . . a cloud-based deployment and something that was scalable on demand and resilient in terms of availability,” said Willoughby. “For us, we needed simple upgrade paths and sequencing available through patching and updates, not just for our strategy, but also to meet our digital goals around security as well.”

In 2021, the NZTA GIS staff began working with Eagle Technology, Esri’s ArcGIS software distributor in New Zealand. 

Jithen Singh, head of public sector business, at Eagle Technology, worked closely with Willoughby and other GIS team members as they were early adopters of ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes. 

Eagle Technology developed a proof of concept to determine if the newly released ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes cloud-native software would support NZTA’s requirements while increasing efficiency, reducing system disruptions, and enabling a scalable decentralized capability. The teams across both organizations meticulously tested the capability and the service with the support of Esri’s ArcGIS technology. Willoughby and his team saw that ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes could deliver on the agency’s goals and modernize their system at the same time. 

“The Kubernetes package was highly favorable because of how it stood to mitigate some of the key challenges we had seen in the past,” said Willoughby. “And for the end user, the look and the feel of the app, the data and information are the same, they come to one entry point and open the app.” 

And Kubernetes scales to the level of support needed. “There’s no need to worry about a dissemination of an application that we need to re-architect,” added Singh. 

Over the course of four days in February 2023, heavy rain and wind swept through parts of the north coast of New Zealand. What was eventually known as Tropical Cyclone Gabrielle marked one of the deadliest cyclones to hit New Zealand, and the most expensive storm on record in the southern hemisphere. Communities endured power outages, landslides, and widespread flooding on more than 400 kilometers of damaged highways in a disaster that cost 11 lives. 

The damage totaled $14.5 billion, including several sections of NZTA rail that flooded and had to be closed for several months. But within hours, NZTA was able to stand up a central geospatial capability on its new platform. “The first thing we did with the platform was leverage it to do surveys and get situational awareness out for and from the teams in the field, capturing data and centralizing it for our response teams,” said Willoughby. The immediate success of the platform gave the GIS staff confidence in its capabilities.

Following that and other successes, Willoughby has presented to NZTA’s executive leadership staff on its achievements, as well as multiple times at the NZ Esri User Conference, and at the global Esri User Conference. “We positioned it as part of the agency’s central data function, treating data as a strategic asset, enabling the agency to achieve its goals as a planner, asset manager, deliverer, and regulator of the state highway network—one of New Zealand’s largest assets.”

Today, NZTA still runs on ArcGIS Enterprise on Kubernetes as its core enterprise geospatial platform. “Alongside ArcGIS Online, it provides what users experience as a single system of engagement for NZTA’s spatial data and integrates with other enterprise systems such as asset management, safety, and investment planning,” said Willoughby.  

In the past, software upgrades could result in as much as two weeks of downtime. Now, software updates take less than an hour with platform upgrades running overnight. 

NZTA’s decentralized approach to geospatial capabilities has matured into a shared model that supports infrastructure delivery programs and alliances under the banner of “how we do GIS at NZTA,” said Willoughby. 

By establishing common standards, licensing, and practices, the agency has improved project efficiency, reduced costs, and strengthened how it works with partners.

“With the Kubernetes environment, we can consolidate all the resources into clusters and node pools, which is a far more cost-effective approach to the services that require resilience and significantly drives down platform cost for the same outcome,” said Willoughby.