Launched in April 2000 by Stelios, the successful founder of easyJet and Chairman of easyGroup, easyCar is one of Europe's fastest growing car rental companies, currently selling in over 2,000 locations in over 47 countries.
The company has transformed itself from owning and managing its own fleet of cars to becoming a leading car broker, offering a wide range of quality vehicles from the best car rental companies around the world.
easyCar is increasingly providing details of its car hire availability on price comparison engines and in line with the rest of the online travel industry is also developing Dynamic Packaging. This allows major online travel agencies or airlines to aggregate related services to its core holiday or flights such as ski hire or a car booking and hence offer the consumer a one-stop service.
"My efforts need to focus upon expanding the supply base and the sales channels rather than the operation of the website." explains Chris Branagan, easyCar's CTO. In response to these issues he led easyCar's overhaul of its Web strategy, which included a new infrastructure and application design, to ensure maximum flexibility and the best possible experience for its growing customer base.
To support a very ambitious growth strategy, easyCar sought out a partner who could provide a cost effective, reliable, secure and scaleable environment.
Chris Branagan quickly ruled out the possibility of running the application in house. "Outsourcing leverages economies of scale and offers more expertise than we would be able to employ here" he commented.
Attenda recently assisted easyCar to safely migrate from a COM model to a .NET platform. This allows easyCar to change the functionality of the Web Application rapidly. It also enables them to integrate their booking engine much closer with those of the suppliers using webservices and Dynamic Packaging. As a result easyCar can now offer a global service, interface with more suppliers and place bookings with a market leading 2 hour lead time!
easyCar’s booking engine has become a complex application with the number of external webservices and interfaces that are required. Attenda monitors the whole application for easyCar ensuring that all of the important gateways are available and responds quickly if there are any issues. “The quality of support that we receive from Attenda has always ensured that any technical issues are diagnosed comprehensively. This is not something easyCar could do internally and continues to allow the easyCar IT team to focus on development” says Branagan.
Simon Hansford, Attenda's vice president, product management and marketing, explains what is required to support a business critical Web Application.
"A highly available application depends on supporting each and every layer of the infrastructure that application sits on. Where many providers concentrate on supporting the system software few if any have skills and expertise at the application layer, even though this is often the most volatile part."
He continues, "We invest time in understanding the application and the performance and availability requirements that our clients attach to it, and commit ourselves in a SLA to provide this - it is commercially rather than technically focused to reflect what is important to that business - its customers."
easyCar’s key requirements were to work with a partner that had the depth and scale of operational expertise that helped ensure the high availability, performance and security of their Web applications on a 24*7 basis – after all easyCar’s front door is the Internet.
The level of expertise and a highly structured and process driven ITIL based Service Desk was required to ensure that easyCar did not have to build that expertise in-house but could rely upon that support at any time - backed up by a meaningful business centric SLA.
XML gateways, improved application release cycles and the availability and performance of the infrastructure have made a considerable contribution to the ongoing growth of easyCar's business and the customer experience of booking a car online.
"The re-launched site has reduced the time to make a booking by as much as 70%," comments Branagan. "We are getting a lot more transactions through the site than we were previously. The real benefit to us is that the site is quicker, far more flexible and easier to integrate with new suppliers. Even better, the cost is less than with the previous provider."
With the business rapidly growing, the two parties continue to work closely to improve the customer experience of the application and ensure it remains highly available and secure. "We never stop developing," continues Chris Branagan. "We are always enhancing the applications to offer more services and reduce the booking time."
Branagan concludes, "The major benefit is that I can actually focus on the business rather than its IT operations. We know we can trust Attenda to do that for us. Its ability to take 100 percent ownership allows us to get on with doing what we do best - running a competitive, reliable and customer friendly car rental business." |