Holiday Autos, the world`s largest leisure car rental broker, has abandoned the Oracle-based central reservation system being developed for the company by a German-based contractor, and has switched to the Progress OpenEdge e-Business Platform to develop the system in a browser-based, thin client architecture.
Holiday Autos offers car rental in 4 000 locations in over 60 countries, selling through sales offices in 40 source markets. The company took the decision to change the development direction on its Voyager centralised reservation system mainly because the German software house handling the project hit serious delays and was running 10 months late. The terrorist attacks in the US on 11 September added to the pressure to get a new system up and running quickly.
Progress` OpenEdge e-Business Platform is a comprehensive suite of enabling technologies and methodologies for speeding up the development, deployment and time to market of e-business applications.
"The lateness of the Oracle project was in stark contrast to the speed of development we experienced when using Progress for our Internet bookings system in late 1999," says Alan Herbage, group IT director at Holiday Autos.
"Starting from scratch at the time, Progress delivered the system in nine weeks, meeting the goal of going live before Christmas that year. Since then we have built up Progress skills in-house and extended the site to enable key partners like Go, the low cost airline, to embed the Holiday Autos site within their own, using XML standards and Progress SonicMQ e-business messaging."
The Progress-based site and back-office database delivered in 1999 have proved to be highly resilient. Holiday Autos` uptime is now better than the industry average, while the system scales easily to meet the demands of high volumes of Web bookings. The Progress-based application also has a lower cost of ownership: "Where Oracle systems required two fulltime database administrators and constant tuning, the Progress system requires none and is self-tuning," says Herbage.
This level of performance gave Holiday Autos the confidence to examine whether the existing Progress-based Internet bookings system could be extended with the extra back-office functionality and links to suppliers planned for Voyager. There was a 60% match between the two developments and the decision to abandon the Oracle project was made.
The business driver for Voyager was to consolidate Holiday Autos` disparate telesales reservation systems in each source market into a standard, centralised system, which could provide online access to reservation information, and centralised accounting and management information. The centralised approach would remove considerable cost from the business while introducing standards and conformity.
"The new system continues the emphasis on e-business, enabling us to work from anywhere with good disaster recovery. We can also examine new ways of working, such as from home. The potential for savings on the communications virtual private network is huge and the browser method of working will also dramatically reduce support costs and enable us to take advantage of network computers, for example," says Herbage.
"The replacement of the disparate systems will allow us to greatly reduce costs to the business. The sooner we go live with the Progress Voyager system, the more cost we can save through efficiencies, which is our top priority during these unpredictable times," says Clive Jacobs, chairman of Holiday Autos and the major force behind Holiday Autos` e-commerce success. In-house development is being handled by a team of eight experienced Progress 4GL and WebSpeed programmers, while Progress Professional Services is building the third-party integration functionality for suppliers such as Alamo and Europcar.
"Holiday Auto`s urgent requirement for a rapid e-commerce solution that cuts costs and delivers efficiency matched Progress`s product offering perfectly. Once again Progress Software has proved its value in the e-commerce arena," says Rick Parry, MD, Progress Software.
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