Denodo Technologies > Case Studies > AAA Uses Virtualized Data to Implement New Organizational Structure and Deliver Flexible Information Architecture

AAA Uses Virtualized Data to Implement New Organizational Structure and Deliver Flexible Information Architecture

Customer Company Size

Large Corporate

Region

America

Country

United States

Product

Denodo's Data Virtualization platform

Tech Stack

Data Virtualization
Oracle
SQL Server

Implementation Scale

Enterprise-wide Deployment

Impact Metrics

Cost Savings
Productivity Improvements

Technology Category

Platform as a Service (PaaS) - Data Management Platforms

Applicable Industries

Automotive

Applicable Functions

Business Operation

Services

Data Science Services

About The Customer

AAA of Northern CA, NV, and UT, is the second-largest regional member club of the national organization AAA and serves more than 4 million Members in over 80+ branch offices in Northern California, Nevada and Utah. The AAA Emergency Road Service responds to almost 30 million distress calls from members nationally. They also sell insurance, offer vacation packages and provide discounts on hotels, cruises, flights etc. AAA also publishes and distributes millions of maps, tour books and other auto and travel publications each year.

The Challenge

AAA of Northern CA, NV, and UT recently reorganized its operations to create a for-profit Insurance division and a not-for-profit Auto division. While the Auto Club put in place its data center, integration platforms and applications, it shared IT resources with the Insurance division so as to keep its operational applications, like reporting tools, call centers working as usual. The company was looking for a way to create an abstraction layer that deployed quickly and continued to feed the operational applications while migration continued under the hood. From a strategic perspective, as they were building their IT infrastructure from the ground up, AAA wanted to infuse flexibility and agility into the architecture that will allow them to introduce future changes at the source, target or middleware layer without disrupting existing workflows.

The Solution

After a 90 day POC, AAA selected Denodo's Data Virtualization platform because it met its short term and long term requirements. While it enabled an easy IT systems migration in the short term, it also provided the flexibility and agility to the AAA architecture which is important in the long term. The unified virtual data layer enabled by Data Virtualization enabled IT systems transition at AAA because it abstracted data consuming applications from changes occurring in the underlying sources during the migration process. Data Virtualization could connect to the disparate data sources, like databases, flat files, spreadsheets which were spread across multiple data centers and publish required data in various formats to analytical applications like Microstrategy as well as transactional applications or SOA entities.

Operational Impact

Processes in virtual layer could be designed or modified very quickly (hours vs. weeks) which allowed AAA to put data flows that kept the operational applications like reporting tools working without disruptions.
Data Virtualization also provided optimization and security features that enabled AAA to handle large volumes of data and enforce the necessary security restrictions on accessing entities.

Quantitative Benefit