Dollar Rent A Car



[pic]

1-2-line solution headline that describes the key business value gained via the solutionRental Car Company Creates Elegant Link to Airline System Using The Microsoft Web Solution Platform

Published: February 2001

DOLLAR Rent A Car received a great business opportunity from Southwest Airlines: Put a link to DOLLAR’s reservation system up on Southwest’s Web site. DOLLAR used the Microsoft® Web solution platform, particularly SOAP technology, to create a simple way for the two disparate systems to communicate.

Situation

DOLLAR Rent A Car is one of the largest car rental agencies, with approximately 430 worldwide locations in 26 countries. This includes 260 locations and about 97,000 cars in the United States. The constant growth in the travel industry – particularly in business travel – pushes DOLLAR to continually seek innovative ways of retaining existing customers and attracting new ones in the face of competition.

A great growth opportunity came in early 2000, when Southwest Airlines contacted DOLLAR about providing a direct link from the Southwest Web site directly into the DOLLAR’s reservation system, which is known as Quick Keys. Southwest, which made the same offer to other major rental car companies, did not specify the method of connection, leaving it up to DOLLAR to make recommendations. The challenge for the DOLLAR Advanced Technology Group was to determine how to easily transfer reservation requests and related data between Southwest, which uses UNIX systems and the CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) distributed object computing infrastructure, and DOLLAR, which is primarily a Microsoft Windows-based shop. Two key requirements for DOLLAR: The solution had to be brought to market quickly with a minimum of complexity, and it had to fit the company’s IT philosophy of investing in technologies with long-range viability.

Solution

DOLLAR chose the Microsoft Web solution platform, specifically focusing on Microsoft Web Services. These included XML-related technologies, including the Microsoft SOAP Toolkit, as well as Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server. The solution enabled DOLLAR to quickly build a translation system between the UNIX/CORBA backend system at Southwest Airlines and DOLLAR’s VMS-based Quick Keys system.

“The Microsoft Web solution platform allowed us to build a prototype and final solution very quickly,” says Peter Osbourne, group manager of the DOLLAR Advanced Technology Group (ATG) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He says DOLLAR’s internal development team, which was versed in other platforms, was initially resistant to learning the Microsoft technologies. However, they were won over once they saw how trouble-free and fast it would be to develop the solution to meet Southwest’s requirements.

“The total development and deployment time was less than six months, and it would have been even faster except for some internal, non-technical issues,” he says. “The prototype only took two weeks to build, and it actually functioned. Our second choice for a development platform was VMS C, and I know that if we had gone that route, development would have taken two or three times as long.”

Microsoft Web Services Provides Clear Path

Osbourne says the solution that DOLLAR came up with had its genesis in a conference he attended on XML. At the time, he saw XML and SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) as an elegant means of establishing links between mixed computing systems.

“When we initially proposed the SOAP-based solution to Southwest, they were less than enthused,” he says. “They wanted to use CORBA or a direct socket connection. It would have been easy enough for us to build a protocol for a specific port. However, that would have been a ‘one-off’ solution that would have brought with it long-term maintenance issues.

“We are trying to get away from highly specialized technology that requires specific expertise and more into open systems where it will be easy to train additional people in the system,” Osbourne continues. “We also wanted to invest in technology that could be leveraged in future projects. We felt that Microsoft’s vision contained in its Web Services idea and its use of XML and SOAP provided the answer we were looking for.”

Microsoft Web Technologies Merge Easily With UNIX System

Following discussions with Southwest, Osbourne says the two companies decided that Southwest would send car rental rate requests, make reservations, and do cancellations using sockets. The format of each request would be in the commonly used “slash” format. DOLLAR, feeling that SOAP was the future technology for the company, decided it would convert the slash data to a SOAP request and send the request to a SOAP processor. The SOAP processor would in turn send a request to the back end Quick Keys system. The following summarizes the functional components.

[pic]

“The purpose of the translator is to receive the message over the socket, check the message to insure the format is correct, create the SOAP packet and send the SOAP packet to the SOAP Processor,” Osbourne says, adding that the entire system is very secure. “The SOAP processor takes a SOAP document, determines what operation is being requested, then calls the requested command based on the document contents.”

“Once the backend system has processed the request the SOAP processor takes the response and formats the response in a SOAP response document. The translator then receives the SOAP packet response from the SOAP Processor. The translator strips off the SOAP packaging. The remaining XML response is then converted to slash format, which is the one used by airlines to communicate, and sends the result to Southwest airlines.”

Microsoft Web Solution Platform Brings Solution To Market Fast

Osbourne says the beauty of the solution lies in the relatively straightforward implementation of the solution and its potential impact on future projects.

“I am an old UNIX C programmer and have been working with Microsoft technologies for years. Developing and debugging using the Visual Basic®-based tools and technologies like SOAP is so much easier than the alternatives,” he says. “The developers who worked on this project were VMS C programmers, so their knowledge was not in this area. But once they saw how elegant this solution was, they were on board with it and thought it was a great idea. It was just so trouble-free.”

He says the success of the project has opened up a lot of possibilities for working easily to build similar solutions with other enterprise partners using Microsoft Web Services and the Visual platform.

“If we get another corporate customer and they want to connect directly to our reservation system, then all we have to do is give them XML schema,” he continues. “Our preference is to work with Microsoft technologies due to their ease of use – for the openness they provide in working with outside parties and customers, and for the way they ease development work. And ultimately, for the great business value it’s brought to DOLLAR in terms of getting a solution to market quickly and broadening the ways that customers can reach us.”

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada information Centre at (800) 563-9048. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information via the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information on DOLLAR, visit their web site at

© 2001 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, ActiveX, BizTalk, Visual Studio, Windows, and Windows NT are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. The names of actual companies and products mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

-----------------------

Solution Overview

Customer Profile

DOLLAR Rent A Car Systems, Inc., is one of the world’s largest car rental agencies. Headquartered in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and a subsidiary of the DOLLAR Thrifty Automotive Group, DOLLAR has 430 worldwide locations in 26 countries. The company maintains a fleet of about 97,000 vehicles.

Business Situation

Southwest Airlines approached DOLLAR about putting a link to the DOLLAR car reservation system on Southwest’s Web site. A great business opportunity was tempered by the technical challenge of linking to Southwest’s UNIX/CORBA-based system.

Solution

Using the Microsoft Web solution platform, including Web Services, DOLLAR used XML and SOAP to create an elegant “translation” system for sending reservation data between the two systems.

Software and Services

Microsoft® Windows® 2000 Server

Microsoft Visual Studio® 6.0

Scenario

B2C

“We are trying to get away from highly specialized technology that requires specific expertise and more into open systems where it will be easy to train additional people in the system. We also wanted to invest in technology that could be leveraged in future projects. We felt that Microsoft’s vision contained in its Web Services idea and its use of XML and SOAP provided the answer we were looking for.”

Peter Osbourne

Group Manager, Advanced Technology Group

DOLLAR Rent A Car

Microsoft Web Solution Platform

Case Study

The .NET Enterprise Servers are Microsoft’s comprehensive family of server applications for building, deploying and managing next generation integrated Web experiences that move beyond today’s world of standalone Web sites. Designed with mission-critical performance in mind, .NET Enterprise Servers provide fast time to market as well as scalability, reliability and manageability for the global, Web-enabled enterprise. They have been built from the ground up for interoperability using open Web standards such as XML. The .NET Enterprise Servers are a key part of Microsoft’s broader .NET strategy, which will enable a distributed computing model for the Internet based on Internet protocols and standards in order to revolutionize the way computers talk to one another on our behalf.

................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download