Perot deal rejig

Europcar is reviewing the future of Greenway - a huge client-server system built by Perot Systems - after several major crashes cost the company 'a six-figure sum a day', writes Chiyo Robertson.

The car rental company has also restructured its outsourcing deal with Perot to overcome service-level agreement (SLA) and under-resourcing problems.

Greenway is an Oracle-based 3,800-user system running on Sequent hardware in nine countries. Two weeks ago it went down for four days after a network failure and disk crash, forcing staff to resort to manual procedures.

Pascal Adam, Europcar's head of Greenway, estimated the company can lose up to a six-figure sum a day when the system crashes. 'Perot is running our business in terms of IT. In a facilities management deal, you don't often have enough contact with your supplier,' he said.

Under-staffing is rumoured to be the cause of problems. Adam told Computing Perot's contract had been 'renegotiated a month ago to address SLAs and under-staffing'.

Perot has added 10 extra staff to the account. Europcar is currently in negotiations with Perot executives about penalty payments.

Perot Systems' Scott Lang, who handles the Europcar account, said: 'We agreed to restructure the deal. We are optimistic about Greenway.'

The system was built after Perot scooped Europcar's #322m, 10-year outsourcing contract in 1992. But in March, problems ensued when Perot upgraded three Sequent nodes to two, higher-throughput nodes, but had to revert back to three nodes.

Europcar plans to upgrade Greenway this year and may choose a different platform.