Car rental company Europcar is close to completing a
two-year revamp of its network, which it expects will slash
communication costs by 60%.
The upgrade is key to Europcar's business plans to deliver new
services to its customers. The company wants to distinguish its
service from its rivals by offering rental offices nearer to its
corporate customers' offices, in addition to outlets at
airports.
The existing X.25 network is being replaced by an ADSL-based IP
virtual private network operated by Vanco.
Stefan Ostrowski, chief information officer at Europcar, said,
"Europcar can only survive if it has competitive IT." He said the
cost savings would release money to improve other areas of the
business.
In its new rental outlets Europcar uses PCs configured as
Linux-based thin clients to access the company's Oracle-based
central reservation system. "We needed to react quickly to change,"
said Ostrowski.
The firm said it ran into difficulties in Europe with network
operators which were unable to meet Europcar's business
requirements because they had difficulties operating efficiently
across geographic boundaries using ADSL.
Part of the problem, according to Ostrowski, was a lack of
engineers at the telcos and differences in the ADSL specification
in some regions. The company would have required expensive
integration consulting to overcome these differences, he
said.
Europcar chose to connect its car rental outlets with ADSL and use
an IP VPN secured using the IPSec standard to send and receive
corporate network traffic over the internet.
Vanco provides a virtual network service across 230 locations,
allowing Europcar to deal with a single network provider across its
wide area network.
Each rental outlet uses Citrix software to access the centrally run
reservation system and Microsoft Office. PCs in the outlets also
run the open source Mozilla web browser.
Along with the Linux thin-client PC, the stations are equipped with
a Wi-Fi link and a handheld terminal to log damage to rental cars.