Case study: Avis drives down VPN costs

Car hire firm Avis Europe operates a large number of small offices across the Continent and needed secure virtual private network (VPN) links between those offices and its datacentres in Manchester and Barcelona.

Avis Europe's corporate data network consists of 29 large sites and 1,755 medium to small sites at places such as airports and railway stations, 70 percent of which have less than three computer screens, according to Mittu Sridhara, vice president of IT for Avis Europe. "We had multiple local contracts for our WAN links in different countries and not a lot of consistency," he says.

Avis believed it could reduce its costs and increase the flexibility of its organisation by outsourcing much of the network's management and operations to a single supplier rather than keeping the work in-house. It also wanted to centralise on an IP-based network, rather than keeping the mixture of X25 and other access technologies it already had in place.

"We needed to standardise across the network and use local providers, but we wanted a single firm to put it together on a global scale to increase reliability and performance," says Sridhara. He evaluated services from 13 companies, including telecoms carriers, virtual network operators and outsourcing service providers, before selecting virtual network operator Vanco.

Avis expects to gain a tenfold increase in bandwidth, and cost savings of roughly £1.2m for each year of the five-year contract it has signed with the operator. The individual contracts that Vanco negotiates with local service providers on Avis's behalf never run for longer than a year, however. Sridhara says the savings will come largely from the eventual replacement of leased lines with cheaper ISDN and DSL connections.

"Vanco is obligated in that contract to get the best deal [on services]. There's a reward-sharing mechanism, whereby for every pound Vanco can save for us in network costs, we get 80 pence of those savings back," says Sridhara.

As well as lower costs, Avis believes it will benefit from improved management and support capabilities. Sridhara adds that network resilience is important for his firm. "Everywhere there is a leased line or DSL circuit there is dial-up backup to the main circuit. If that dial-up line is used, Vanco covers that. The biggest issue for Avis is not downtime but resilience, so links must be fixed right away," he explains.

The upgrade of Avis's new Europe-wide network is ongoing and Sridhara says he does not expect it to be completed until June. He pinpoints a number of minor problems that have surfaced so far. "The information derived from visits to local sites was not necessarily correct. For example, we have found offices with six terminals instead of the three we were expecting or 2Mbit/s DSL instead of ISDN. Those issues have cropped up, and Vanco has worked with local managers to resolve them," he says. The network is supported by a mixture of local Avis employees and Vanco support staff.

Sridhara says Avis plans to make more use of voice over IP (VoIP) in the future. "To some extent, we will move to VoIP where possible. We'll conduct a refresh of telephones and telephone switches to ensure that everything we replace over the next few years is IP-capable," he adds.

Have your say: reply to IT Week