Regional
Transportation Commission of Washoe County (RTC)
Bus
Vontas Cloud
Vontas OnRoute for CAD/AVL
“Working with Vontas allows us to basically work with one partner and allows us to be more streamlined and provide better and more accurate information to our customers.”
Jim Gee
Director of Public
Transit and Operations, RTC
Background
The Regional Transportation Commission of Washoe County (RTC) has been serving its community of riders since 1979. Like many transit agencies, they need equipment that is innovative and modernized to fit their needs and get people where they need to go. With Vontas, RTC was able to upgrade their Vontas OnRoute CAD/AVL system in Vontas Cloud, powered by the Microsoft Azure cloud platform and gain a whole new set of benefits for their dispatchers.
Challenges
“For us, it was a combination of a few different factors,” said Jim Gee, Director of Public Transit and Operations. “It’s obviously easier maintenance for IT staff. It is more efficient with better up-time and eventually lower costs because we don’t have to invest in our own servers. We can take advantage of the economies of scale of moving to the cloud and having someone else manage that process for us.”
“We thought the cloud is the way to go and really should be the path that all transit systems are on. The idea of having servers in the back room really doesn’t make sense anymore in the current IT environment, especially for an agency our size,” said Gee. Gee explained how being in the cloud allows the RTC to take advantage of highly available, secure, cost effective and scalable services.
Solution
The OnRoute CAD/AVL system in Vontas Cloud, powered by the Microsoft Azure, helps RTC reduce costs while providing the agility to scale resources in real-time. Freed from the burden of maintaining infrastructure, RTC’s IT team can focus on innovation and improving transit services. In addition, secure, cloud based and geo- redundant backups provide peace of mind in regards to the availability of agency services and data. They are also able to take advantage of cloud native services such as Microsoft Entra ID with multi-factor authentication to enhance end-user secure access to the solution. “A more seamless backup means better security and it’s essentially a more robust package that we could build and offer ourselves internally.”
Results
Working with Vontas helped RTC sort a large amount of legacy technology applications that became difficult to manage. “Vontas has been an excellent partner of ours,” said Gee. “Working with Vontas allows us to basically work with one partner and allows us to be more streamlined and provide better and more accurate information to our customers.”
The upgrade to the cloud was done in six months and Gee emphasized that it was “absolutely seamless with no issues at all, which, underscores that we made the right decision last year moving to the cloud and that future upgrades should continue to be seamless. In essence, that’s less work for our IT staff, less work for operations, and allows us to just have the latest and greatest and deliver the best product to our customers.”
Kevin Robillard, Assistant Operations Manager for Keolis Group, praised the upgrade as “a far smoother experience than the old system we used to use. Ever since we moved to the cloud, it’s been a seamless experience. I can get data at home, at work, on a laptop, or on a phone. It is very portable, and I appreciate that.”