Innovative IT services for Arriva

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By solving its critical problems of with IT services and improving its existing solutions, Euvic helped Arriva to leverage the new AWS-based platform. And, as a result, to expand their business.

Client

Arriva is a multinational public transport company headquartered in Sunderland, Tyne and Wear, United Kingdom. It was established in 1938 as T Cowie and through a number of mergers and acquisitions was rebranded to Arriva in 1997, to become a subsidiary of Deutsche Bahn in 2010. Arriva operates bus, coach, train, tram and waterbus services in 14 countries across Europe.

Challenge

Arriva Sweden was running its infrastructure from a co-location site in Denmark, supporting over 3,900 employees and providing services to 170 million customers every year. The on-premises solution was neither stable nor flexible enough to meet the company’s and its customers’ needs. As the digitalization of transport continued, Arriva asked Euvic to help them become more competitive in that industry and, at the same time, to build a more stable and flexible IT-environment.

Solution

After Euvic was chosen as Arriva’s innovation service provider, we carried out several projects. Our first aim was to solve the most critical problems regarding the flexibility and stability of all of the client’s IT services:

Arriva decided to move away from the hosted environment in Denmark and make a transition to the cloud. They chose AWS over Azure and other providers because of the breadth of services, security, support for developers, and the possibility to leverage its existing investments by its Microsoft licenses to AWS. With Euvic’s help, in less than 700 hours hundreds of Windows servers were migrated to AWS, including business critical large SQL and Oracle databases.

Euvic analyzed the existing applications and made them cloud-ready without significantly changing the architecture of the core infrastructure, guaranteeing tangible benefits to Arriva early-on.

After a traditional “lift and shift”, we looked into how to improve the existing services. We achieved it by means such as:

migrating several SQL & Oracle databases to AWS Relational Database Services (RDS) to take advantage of the ease of use offered by managed services.

migrating the end-user-platform to Euvic’s modern managed service platform, including Office 365 for all users in order to improve the user environment.

migrating Trapeze, a business-critical planning system used to schedule and optimize routes and staffing for trains and buses, to AWS. Trapeze was running in a Citrix environment hosted in Denmark, but the on-premises solution was expensive and lacked the required functionalities. 3,900 employees needed access to a web-based application to be able to use the most basic functions of Trapeze while around 190 users needed access to its more advanced features. Euvic retired Arriva’s Citrix environment by using AWS Appstream 2.0 and AWS WorkSpaces.

When the solution was more stable and flexible, and the users finally had a modern IT platform to work on, Arriva could concentrate their efforts on enhancing the business value that IT could provide by building a bus and train website with some of the latest technologies in the area of IoT and Information solutions, helping them win several tenders for train and bus contracts.

Business benefits

A more stable environment with fewer service outages, more flexible and suitable for the new digital requirements of the transportation industry.

Happier end users thanks to a more modern end-user-platform.

Arriva could leverage the AWS-based infrastructure and Euvic’s competency to create new platforms for buses and trains which helped them expand their business. It would have been difficult, if not impossible, with their old solution.

Credentials

Migrating the environment to AWS with Euvic was an easy decision given the breadth of service and stability offered by the AWS platform. The results were as expected and after the migration and together with Euvic we created a lot of new services which would have been impossible in such a short time on the old, hosted platform.