Sybase – Addison Lee – Application Server – ASE
Addison Lee started over 35 years ago and is now the leading minicab company in all of London. Sybase and BT together help Addison Lee maintain great customer service while keeping up with 35% yearly growth.
http://www.sybase.com
[Video Transcript]
Hi everyone, I would love to be with you, but the Sybase project goes live this week. Phil and Justin keep your mobiles switched on, but I am sure we wont need them. Addison Lee was started by a gentleman named John Griffin over 30 years ago in Battersea and they had approximately three cars, which is amazing when you now look back over the fleet which consists of over 2 ½ thousand vehicles. Day to day, its a very real time environment, very dynamic; customers get very upset when their vehicles turn up late. We have to use technology to make the best of the systems we have and make sure the customers receive a good service and also to keep the drivers happy at the same time. We have grown now, year on year, approximately 35% each year. So, 35% of last years figure is a much higher 35% this year. Weve had to consolidate all this information to a single platform which is highly available and resilient, which has led us onto the Sybase solution. We approached two companies, BT Basilica, a local reseller, and we were actually quite far down the road with Basilica when BT introduced us to Sybase. I had used Sybase products when we carried out a project with the University of Westminster however, I hadnt had contact with Sybase for over 10 years and I hadnt really considered them as an option. Their portfolio of products range changed dramatically, now that I looked at it but, I wouldnt have thought of talking to them if BT had not introduced them to me. One of the attractions is that Sybase is currently used with our sense of solution, which brought us into line with running an application on a single platform. We were looking for some very dedicated attention, and we felt that if we chose other suppliers, we would just be a small fish in a big pond. Having chosen Sybase, they gave us a dedicated account manager and he has stuck with us from inception to implementation, which we are very happy with. One of the big reasons for choosing Sybase was the test networks, or as I call it the MD test, which is a real story. Once we set us the two test environments we needed to test the zero down time as if it was a real test, and so we called our MD John Griffin and asked him to pull out the power plug. This was totally unannounced, we hadnt warned Sybase, and they were looking at us quite strangely but, sure enough everything switched over seamlessly. The test was 100% successful, and they were smiling away thinking weve got the deal, we are home and dry now, and thats exactly what happened. In the same way that we would not have considered Sybase without BTs involvement, I dont think that BT could have supplied the solution obviously without Sybase and they have both been very professional. And what thats meant is that now we are confident to move on and tackle other projects that we have in mind. The most eminent is the mobile booker. Imagine if you had an icon on your mobile phone that enabled you to book the minicar with one or two clicks, a really great idea. And, from we have seen so far with the BT and Sybase demonstration, we like the look of it and I am sure if you guys can give us an even bigger discount, it can be even more compelling. One of the challenges we face, is being open 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That means that we have to have a highly available system with full resilience and backups in place. And with the Sybase products we are using application server, ASE and open switch to give us that functionality, and we really have made it highly available, which we are very happy with.
Duration : 0:3:26
http://www.sybase.com/