Avis Budget benefits from SOA implementation

Car rental firm's confidence in SOA grows as e-receipt application rollout is a success

Avis Budget Group is offering customers e-receipts after implementing a service-oriented architecture (SOA) to streamline its core business processes.

The new platform supplied by BEA will allow the car rental firm to offer customers web services as well as improving the efficiency of internal operations.

The SOA-based system will support Avis Budget’s 30,000 employees in more than 70 countries

The Omega (one merged enterprise and global architecture) platform, is built on BEA's WebLogic technology and aims to deliver improved customer services.

The first application deployed on Omega was e-receipts, which provides convenience for customers by allowing them to receive electronic receipts via email.
The technology investment is intended to maintain the firm’s market competitiveness, said vice president of technology at Avis Budget, John Turato.

“We want a flexible business platform that enables us to turn innovative ideas into reality quickly and reliably,” he said.

The system will support all customer contact channels including call centres, airport rental counters, standalone facilities and web site.

Thanks to SOA, Avis Budget is able to reuse services created for one application on subsequent projects, said Turato.

“Reusing proven software components can accelerate project timelines, reduce costs, and improve outcomes,” he said.

“E-receipts is a tangible example of the transformative influence of SOA. In the past, making a core business process such as rental returns paperless would have been impossible."