Leading Saudi Car Rental Company Enhances Speed and Quality of Customer Services While Cutting Costs by Standardizing on Nutanix
Being one of Saudi Arabia’s leading car rental companies, Yelo knows that seamless, memorable journeys start long before customers step into their vehicles. Digital services underpin critical milestones – from registration and booking, to upgrades and returns – and must, like the company’s fleet, run reliably and at top performance with minimal maintenance. So, while its wide network of physical branches was a business edge, its fragmented database environment, sprawling on-prem data centers and multiple clouds was not.
To eliminate the roadblocks this presented to its accelerating business growth, Yelo sought out a modern solution and found its answer in Nutanix.
| Streamlined Customer Service | Enhanced Customer Confidence | Reduced Cloud Costs |
|---|---|---|
| 99.99% availability and database response time and latency reductions of 20% and 30%, respectively, ensure fast and consistent customer service | Automation streamlines database patching, reducing vulnerabilities and safeguarding customer and organizational data | Database consolidation enabled 50% reduction in monthly cloud costs while simplified maintenance further slashed TCO |
Consolidating our databases on Nutanix cut our monthly cloud bill in half.
There are good reasons why Yelo has been recognized as Saudi Arabia's best car rental provider. By making every customer experience as relevant and personalized as possible, the company aims to impress customers at every step. Yelo works to ensure that reservations, registration, pickup, drop-off, payments, and support are not just part of the process, but delightful experiences. Unsurprisingly, digital technologies are central to this mission.
Empowering its customers to zip seamlessly across its regions of coverage therefore requires that its digital data can do the same. However, the company’s fragmented database environment, which relied on multiple database engines across on-premises and cloud data centers, made this a challenge. “My team was expending considerable effort on system maintenance which stifled scalability and impeded innovation, all while weighing us down with considerable costs,” explained Abdelrahim Alhanbali, of IT Director, Yelo.
While a long list of highly satisfied Saudi reference customers and impressive assessments by leading market analysts initially led Al-Hanbali and his team to Nutanix, it was Nutanix’s comprehensive PoC which assured Yelo that it was the technology partner they needed.
A Turnkey Solution
This thorough, hands-on evaluation gave Yelo the confidence to go the distance with Nutanix, implementing everything from the vendor’s cloud platform and virtualization solutions to its storage management and database management platforms.
“Standardizing on a single vendor immediately eliminated all the complexity we previously faced. Consolidating our databases on Nutanix cut our monthly cloud bill in half. And the many IT manhours won back translated to further TCO reduction,” said Alhanbali.
Offering examples of just how dramatic these reductions in IT management overheads have been, Alhanbali said, “Thanks to the powerful one-click provisioning feature, Nutanix has slashed database provisioning time from two weeks to just 90-minutes. Similarly, with one-click patching, updating 50 databases, which previously took over a month and a half, now takes us under a week.”
IT Drives Customer Delight
Equally impressive have been the performance improvements Yelo has experienced since the migration. With database throughput soaring by over 30%, response times and latency have been slashed by 20% and 30% respectively. Simultaneously, database availability now exceeds 99.99% and concurrent user support has surged by an impressive 40%.
“In more tangible terms, this means that when a customer walks into any branch across our expansive network, they can be registered, select the ideal vehicle for their price and preferences, and proceed with the necessary paperwork and payments in the most efficient way. These intuitive experiences extend to our all-in-one app for which the Nutanix Database Service works invisibly in the background to give customers the convenience they need instantly, at their fingertips,” said Alhanbali.
Nutanix Database Service has also automated patching, reducing the time it takes to patch databases by 5x.. “The nature of our business necessitates the handling of sensitive customer data – from contact information and drivers’ licenses to payment details and location-based data. Having our systems always up to date goes a long way in keeping this valuable information securely vaulted which underpins the trust our customers place in us,” said Al-Hanbali.
Exceptional Support
Alhanbali highlights how the top-quality of Nutanix’s solutions are perfectly complemented by the world-class support his team receives. “Whenever we raise a ticket, their support engineers are readily available with precise resolutions. Additionally, their support ethos goes beyond just addressing immediate issues. Nutanix proactively monitors our systems, providing recommendations for optimization, and offering guidance on best practices. This proactivity has helped prevent potential problems and optimize our infrastructure for performance and reliability,” he said.
Looking out to the horizon, Alhanbali states that in addition to migrating additional database workloads to Nutanix, Yelo is assessing how it can leverage the vendor’s support to unlock the full potential of its rich data stores.
“We are especially interested in Nutanix’s capabilities in AI, machine learning, and analytics as this can help us go the extra mile in gleaning insights from data, improving decision-making processes, and driving further innovation and enhancements for our customers,” he concluded.