Brazil’s Localiza, which specializes in renting vehicles throughout South America via individual rentals, rental dealership franchising, and fleet rentals, recently chose IBM PureSystems and Smarter Storage systems to help improve customer service by more effectively processing, managing, and storing its mounting data volumes.

Facing exponential growth, Localiza needed to improve service time responses to customers at both its headquarters and stores.

In addition, availability, performance and resilience were needed to strengthen and modernize its IT environment, according to IBM. Working with IBM Business Partner PC Place, IBM implemented a new storage system, which replaced the existing infrastructure. The data then was migrated to the new equipment and replicated to a contingency site with the same technology. Finally, all the previous systems were virtualized in order to take full advantage of pre-existing resources.

"The project has greatly reduced our maintenance and management costs, improved utilization of storage areas and system performance, and provided a full and reliable replication of data. As a direct result of this, customer transaction times have been reduced by 30 percent," said Breno Scheid Mascarenhas, Localiza’s IT infrastructure manager. "We can complete our payroll services 30-percent faster and we have also seen a significant improvement for customers who can now rent a car faster."

Business continuity was another important benefit for this project, according to IBM. With this new solution, Localiza could remain productive and protected against any financial losses associated with a possible downtime caused by unexpected interruptions.

The project was financed by IBM Global Financing, the lending and leasing arm of IBM, to help Localiza lower the total cost of ownership and better manage its IT budget, according to IBM.