Avis Budget Group: John Turato, VP of Technology

John Turato, Vice President of Technology for Avis-Budget Group talks about managing technical operations for a rental fleet of more than 400,000 vehicles worldwide. Turato also discusses transformation at the rental car operator, and his other role, Chairman of the OpenTravel Alliance, a group of companies developing web 2.0 standards for the online travel industry.

You are the Chairman of the Open Travel Alliance, and perhaps you could start by giving us some colour on exactly what it is.

John Turato: Sure. The Open Travel Alliance is a group of travel related companies it's travel suppliers, travel distributors, software development companies that support the travel industry. All sorts of travel companies that have come together to work together to develop specifications to support use of the Internet for travel, reservations, etc.

And what kind of progress have you made so far in terms of the schemas and the adoption rate?

John Turato: I think that you have to look at it form the perspective of various industries, various supply groups, as a start. In the car rental side of it, tremendous traction, because generally speaking there weren't a lot of specifications available for travel and the travel space in terms of distribution. Air and hotel have also been major users of OTA XML. The cruise industry recently has embraced the OTA Open Travel and is developing specifications as we speak and traction is really starting to catch on there as well.

Now, in terms of traction, what would the customer experience be by virtue of having these XML schemes available?

John Turato: In many other cases it allows for a standard interface into various channels of reservation capability. Whether it's a website, whether it's a reservation system at a particular distribution company, the specs really are foundational and that is actually one of the challenges that we're addressing with the Open Travel Alliance in terms of how do we move from building the foundation to more of a higher level or more of a business approach to orchestrating various services, including reservation but many other things content delivery, etc.

That sounds to me like one of these visions from the semantic Web, where you would float something on to the Internet saying, "Now, I want to travel to China and I want to stay in this kind of hotel and here are the dates I'm going". And then some agent, out on the Internet, would go and take care of all that for you and deliver everything in a package knowing all your preferences and dates and conflicts. Is that something that you see as the end result of all these?

John Turato: Sure. Ultimately that definitely is the nirvana that we're all searching for, but in order to get to that point you definitely have to bring those foundational pieces, like the hard work of developing specifications and doing what I sometimes call "business architecture" in terms of melding the technology part of it with the business part.

What would be an example of a new kind of business service that you could deliver by this kind of technology?

John Turato: Well, one example from our business is we're able to deliver receipts through email now, and that's based on underlying OTA specifications. Another example of something that's a little bit higher on the scale potentially is some of the content delivery, in the hospitality industry especially. We're just starting a new sub committee right now on content, which will allow suppliers much more control on how they deliver their content. One of the challenges years ago was, suppliers felt that perhaps some of the distributors were not delivering all the content or delivering their content correctly.

Now John Turato, you're also the head of technology for the Avis Budget group, and what's the size and scope of what you're doing there?

John Turato: Yeah, with Avis Budget, I concentrate primarily on architectural engineering. The sort of the connection between Open Travel and my so called day job is that I'm responsible for our service oriented architecture, which we have been growing since roughly about 1999 and the year 2000. We've grown that service oriented architecture into a platform that values reuse and we monitor reuse, we have governance around the creation of services and the deployment of them. Services has become the lingua franca of many of our design reviews these days, which is actually quite remarkable for a company that has such a long entrenched legacy system.

Let me ask you about that transition. How are you making that transition from that legacy mainframe heritage into this new services world? What are some of the issues that you are dealing with right now?

John Turato: You know, frankly everyone would love to do a big bang, where we flip a switch and our legacy system is magically transformed into a component based model. See, you can't do that, the dollars to do that and the time to do that, the complexity to do that is just really difficult. So, the approach that we've been taking up to this point is what I like to call our "island approach" we identify islands of functionality that, as they're going through a redesign or something new is developed, we identify where or which project is a good candidate for developing services and then it goes through our SOA process.

What are some of the projects that you've worked on recently that lend themselves to SOA?

John Turato: As I said, the e receipt project, where we deliver or have the capability of delivering an e receipt to our customers upon returning their car. That receipt would be in their email as they're getting on the bus, which is something nice. That whole service, that whole new capability, so called competitive advantage, is based on a very simple service called our notification service.

The notification service has some very basic jobs it delivers emails, it delivers SMS messages, it delivers faxes. That's what the service does. Now that's in our so called toolbox and we can reuse that service. So, this is a case where we developed the service. We're using it for new applications and now, the service, the notification service, has been reused a number of times already.

Now, Avis is in about 70 countries. What are some of the challenges in working internationally?

John Turato: Even though we're international in that sense, we have what we call a wizard system. It's the same system for any other country. It's all driven out of a central location. As far as languages go, many of the countries have some of their own development staffs and some of their own local type applications, but from the core reservation rental system, it's handled out of our headquarters.

And, finally is Avis doing anything in the green area? And I would ask it in two ways. One is in the way that you build your infrastructure and deal with that, and secondly in the automobiles that you provide your customers.

John Turato: Yeah, sure. From a data center perspective, we actually outsource our operations, but we are constantly on top of our outsource partner in terms of virtualisation, reducing the number of servers, and creating the most efficient data centre from a heating perspective as well as an electricity perspective. As far as our vehicles... if you read the press, I'm sure, you'll see that the Avis and Budget have increased their fleet with hybrid cars, etcetera. So, these are certainly things that we address in all of our operations.