Transforming Avis' rate shop using AWS Cloud
TCS helps upgrade the car rental firm's applications through mainframe modernization
3
MINS READ
Highlights
Challenge
Avis Budget Group is one of the world’s largest car rental companies operating in 180 countries from over 11,500 locations. Avis is focusing on reinventing the car rental experience through data-driven intelligence, and enabling connectivity, convenience and choice through digitalization.
To keep pace with the changing industry dynamics, Avis needed to transform its legacy mainframe platform. Rate Shop, the company’s primary revenue-generating product, needed to be re-architected to be cloud-ready and provide the flexibility to adjust pricing in real-time to drive optimal demand and meet customer expectations. Rate Shop accounts for 70% of the transaction volume on Avis’ IT systems, growing on an average of 25% annually. Re-architecting to a cloud-based environment was a necessity to meet such demand. Along with the immediate goal of reducing operational and licensing costs of legacy applications, Avis also required a seamless cloud migration journey to scale customer engagement and overcome technical debt.
Solution
TCS partnered with Avis to transform Rate Shop from a legacy assembler-based, tightly coupled application, running on the mainframe, to a modern C-based application running on the AWS cloud. As part of this transformation, TCS migrated more than 250 legacy databases (DB2 and IMS) to high performance Couchbase database technology on AWS EC2 (elastic compute) cloud instances. IBM’s data replication product, CDC (change data capture) in conjunction with Apache Kafka was leveraged to replicate very large data volumes from the mainframe to cloud in real time.
TCS worked with Avis to design a highly resilient, highly available solution that enabled a low-risk iterative rollout by channel and segment. Using its agile methodology, TCS architected Rate Shop to the AWS cloud to kick start Avis’ digitalization journey. This approach enabled TCS to successfully execute the Rate Shop cloud migration program in just eight months. TCS implemented real-time analytics of Rate Shop operations that resulted in a seamless end user experience on AWS. This fueled the on-demand pricing decisions and timely vehicle availability to match customer needs. To meet the sub-second Rate Shop response time needs, Amazon ECS, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancer, ElastiCache and CloudWatch services were used.
The team established a comprehensive DevOps foundation to automate key tasks related to application integration, cloud provisioning, application configuration, and test case execution. With this implementation, Avis’ ongoing integration and deployment needs were automated and scripted by leveraging native AWS CodeCommit in combination with Jenkins. This also provided greater security controls of the code migration process.
Benefits
TCS was involved from the ideation stage to incubation and initiation for the mainframe modernization at Avis. Post incubation, TCS successfully helped Avis re-engineer an improved customer experience model for its ongoing digital transformation across the enterprise fostering purpose-led growth.
The modernization of the Avis Rate Shop application to AWS has resulted in:
What made this happen
Develop strategies for holistic cloud transformation, with end-to-end services for cloud operating models, security, operations set-up, digital process enablement, and cloud value realization.
Simplify hybrid cloud orchestration with a Machine First™ approach, powered by TCS’ Cloud Exponence platform. Make the most of SAP application management services and SAP BASIS support with our industry-leading delivery and operations management capabilities.
Deliver a unified omnichannel user (agent) experience with our AI-based self-service capabilities. Reimagine your customer experience with a CX collaboration space powered by TCS RemacX platform.
Build a resilient and future-ready architecture, leveraging cloud-native infrastructure, automation, and reusable and ready-to-deploy components, including AWS containers, AWS serverless microservices (chassis) platform, and DevSecOps factory.
Enable collaborative ecosystems and cloud computing at the edge to create hyper-personalized customer experiences with intelligent products, connected plants, connected services, and product life cycle management.
Rapidly define, design, and deploy AWS foundational platforms and services for cost management, continuous improvement, and security using services powered by TCS Cloud Mason Framework and reusable infrastructure as code (IaC) templates.
Accelerate business transformation with next-gen products and platforms contextualized for industries.
Reimagine enterprise applications, data, or infrastructure with automated cloud migration services, leveraging data center discovery and migration factory powered by TCS Cloud Counsel platform, TCS CrystallusTM for S/4HANA, and TCS ConvertCore.
Transition seamlessly from legacy applications and systems to microservices-based cloud architectures by leveraging automation and AI.
What the client says