The challenge: Legacy modernization 

Avis Budget Group is one of the world’s largest car rental companies operating in 180 countries from over 11,500 locations.

Avis focuses on reinventing the car rental experience through data-driven intelligence, and enabling connectivity, convenience, and choice through digitalization.

To keep pace with the changing industry dynamics, Avis needed to transform its legacy mainframe platform. Rate Shop, the company’s primary revenue-generating product, needed to be re-architected with IT modernization to be cloud-ready and have the flexibility to adjust pricing in real-time to drive optimal demand and meet customer expectations. Rate Shop accounts for 70% of the transaction volume on Avis’ IT systems, growing at 25% annually on average. Re-architecting to a cloud-based environment was a necessity to meet such demand. Along with the immediate goal of reducing operational and licensing costs of legacy applications, Avis also required a seamless cloud migration journey to scale customer engagement and overcome technical debt.

The solution: Mainframe modernization using AWS cloud

TCS partnered with Avis to transform Rate Shop from a legacy assembler-based, tightly coupled application running on the mainframe to a modern C-based application running on the AWS cloud.

As part of this transformation using Amazon cloud services, TCS migrated more than 250 legacy databases (DB2 and IMS) to high-performance Couchbase database technology on AWS EC2 (elastic compute) cloud instances. IBM’s data replication product, CDC (change data capture), in conjunction with Apache Kafka, was leveraged for the IT modernization process to replicate very large data volumes from the mainframe to cloud in real time.

TCS worked with Avis to design a highly resilient, highly available solution that enabled a low-risk iterative rollout by channel and segment. Using its agile methodology, TCS architected Rate Shop to the AWS cloud to kick-start Avis’ digitalization journey. This approach enabled TCS to successfully execute the Rate Shop’s cloud migration program in just eight months. TCS implemented real-time analytics of Rate Shop operations that resulted in a seamless end user experience on Amazon cloud services. This fueled the on-demand pricing decisions and timely vehicle availability to match customer needs. To meet the sub-second Rate Shop response time needs, Amazon ECS, Auto Scaling, Elastic Load Balancer, ElastiCache, and CloudWatch services were used.

The team established a comprehensive DevOps foundation to automate key tasks related to application integration, cloud provisioning, application configuration, and test case execution. With this, Avis’ ongoing integration and deployment needs were automated and scripted by leveraging native AWS CodeCommit in combination with Jenkins. This also provided greater security controls for the code migration process.

The benefits: Faster time-to-market, zero downtime

TCS was involved from the ideation to incubation and initiation stages of mainframe IT modernization at Avis.

Post incubation, TCS successfully helped Avis re-engineer an improved customer experience model for its digital transformation across the enterprise, fostering purpose-led growth.