ATU was founded in 1985 in Germany and has been a Mobivia brand since 2016. It has approximately 10,000 employees in Germany and Austria with 599 automotive repair workshops in both countries. The business is made up of physical workshops and an integrated online business, offering a wide range of car repair services, automotive spare parts, accessories, and fitting services.
The challenge
To create new revenue streams, ATU attempted to digitalize its services and increase its online presence, but the database servers were built on a 20-year-old legacy Oracle infrastructure. In the first stage of digitalization, the company had built a platform to host different applications covering a couple of workflows and processes. However, ATU soon realized it was becoming too complex and expensive in terms of licensing costs, which necessitated a search for an alternative SQL database platform.
The solution
ATU adopted PostgreSQL Community supported by EDB’s Standard Support Plan, which includes four nines of high-availability, backup, recovery, replication, and 24x7 technical support. The company is also using EDB’s Backup and Recovery Manager, which is an administration tool for remote backups and disaster recovery of PostgreSQL servers in business-critical environments.
The results
- Ability to supplant costly legacy Oracle database and successfully avoiding vendor lock-in
- Online platform running millions of revenue-generating transactions with minimal downtime
- Reliable PostgreSQL database with four nines of high-availability, backup, recovery, and support
- Ability to support applications on top of the database without the need for an in-house DBA
Automotive business on a path to digitalization
Since becoming part of the larger automotive products distributor Mobivia in 2016, ATU has been on a path to evolve and grow its revenue-generating online business. The objective has been to enable its retail motorists and enterprise fleet customers to use the ATU website to book service appointments, order car spare parts, and request spare parts fitting. Given that 50% of ATU’s online business is based on key applications, such as appointment booking, stock availability, and pricing information, it was essential that the database be robust and reliable.
At first, ATU tried leveraging its legacy Oracle infrastructure to host the website’s database servers. However, ATU soon realized that Oracle’s complex licensing terms made it prohibitively expensive to roll out an agile online platform. Also, using Oracle in the past had been plagued with outages that were costly to the business, so ATU decided to build the database from the ground up on PostgreSQL and adopted EDB’s Standard Support package to ensure it had access to expert help when needed.
The partnership with EDB gave ATU access to a number of enterprise tools to perform backup, recovery, replication, 24x7 technical support, as well as the reassurance of four nines of high availability for its commercial website application.
“We are running a mission-critical online business operation on PostgreSQL, where the slightest amount of downtime could lead us to significant loss of revenue,” said Moataz Elmasry, Head of Databases and Platforms at ATU. “We needed a reliable partner who could help us reach and maintain 99.99% of availability for our commercial website, with dependable and immediate access to support staff in critical situations.”
With the onset of the COVID19 pandemic, ATU’s online retail platform became paramount in offering existing and new services to customers, particularly during the lockdowns. The company was able to implement new applications to enable a contactless shopping experience, where customers would use the click and collect service to order car parts online and pick up the products at a convenient workshop without the need to come into physical contact with retail staff. Additionally, the pandemic brought out new services such as disinfecting vehicles for fleet and rental cars, which helped drive new revenue streams for ATU.
Working with the EDB PostgreSQL experts
Having partnered with EDB since 2019, ATU’s IT team is confident that the EDB team both understands and is committed to supporting ATU’s mission-critical business operations. Using the Backup and Recovery Manager from EDB for remote backups and disaster recovery enables the EDB team of PostgreSQL experts to remotely monitor ATU’s database performance, detect, and react more quickly to any potential issues. This has enabled ATU’s IT team to focus on building applications that help the business respond to its evolving customer needs, without the need for an in-house DBA to look after the database.
By having an open database platform with a large community of contributors and supported by experts from EDB, the ATU team can concentrate on its future IT modernization plans reassured that a critical component in its IT architecture will remain available and has the flexibility to adapt to the evolving requirements of the business.
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