The Central Ohio Transit Authority (COTA) has been supporting transit riders of Ohio since 1974, providing nearly 12 million passenger trips annually across a 562 square mile service area with approximately 3,000 active transit stops and serving Central Ohio for over 50 years. In mid-2023, COTA was looking to upgrade their CAD/AVL software solution to take advantage of new features and migrate the Vontas OnRoute CAD/AVL, OnSite Yard Manager, and Automated Fare Collection Systems to the Cloud, a solution hosted by Vontas, aimed to reduce the agency local IT workload. Vontas has partnered with Microsoft to deploy products to Azure for the cloud solution. This improves availability, scalability, and accessibility of applications, security, and compliance, and most importantly, supports modernized solutions such as COTA’s planned LinkUs transportation and growth initiative.
As COTA looks to the future, they plan on the addition of several electric vehicles to the fleet by 2025 and must manage state-of-charge. They also struggled with operating a data center to support the many software applications that help sustain COTA’s sizable operations. Large data center operations also require a robust Cyber Security Team to address the ever-evolving threat landscape and a team of system admins to manage and implement the recurring software patches, which results in a heavy workload for any IT department. Finally, COTA was on a legacy version of OnRoute, and they were eager to take advantage of the new features in version 23.
“At the time, COTA was also looking to add a second location,” said Ryan Goff, Vontas Cloud Architect. “Between integrating a new location and upgrading the software, they realized that they would have to do a total hardware refresh which would be a very costly process. It would mean hiring additional staff, buying new hardware, building an entire second environment. We were able to offer them a better alternative.”
As part of the CAD/AVL upgrade project, COTA added the capability to manage State-of-Charge (SOC) on their electric buses and create rules using Intelligent Decision Support (IDS) within the OnRoute software to alert dispatchers when SOC drops below a pre-set level automatically.
Other new capabilities include enhanced predictions for real-time vehicle tracking and the ability to create Shuttle service workpieces for events such as the Red, White & Boom fireworks celebration for Independence Day.
“By moving to the Cloud, COTA was also able to offload many of the security concerns and other network administration tasks for their Vontas software suite,” says Jeremy Bartlett, COTA Product Manager ITS. “We had challenges with frequent interruption to service with patching. Now patching is nearly seamless to the agency.” Having Vontas handle their OnRoute quarterly patches and the continual Microsoft ™ patches means a more robust system with near-zero downtime.
The OnRoute CAD/AVL system in Vontas Cloud, powered by the Microsoft Azure, helps reduce costs while providing the agility to scale resources in real-time. Freed from the burden of maintaining infrastructure, COTA’s IT team would be able to focus on innovation and improving transit services. In addition, secure, cloud based and geo-redundant backups and replication provide peace of mind in regard to the availability of agency services and data.
Also, one of the solutions in use is Azure Virtual Desktop, which now allows agency staff to log in and work from anywhere they have Internet access. In addition to easier updates, this feature also adds significant value to the agency’s business continuity strategy. Another benefit to using Azure Virtual Desktop is that the COTA team no longer has to worry about “touching” each workstation to deploy product and Operating System patches, as the Azure Cloud architecture allows these updates to be done within the hosted environment.
The cloud-hosted environment provides COTA peace of mind from a security and business continuity standpoint. With Azure, they get a 24/7/365 Network Operations Center and up-to-date security protocols that sync with industry best practices. Vontas and COTA created a robust network architecture using IPSec tunnels to securely connect their facilities and vehicles to Azure.
Finally, by deploying Disaster Recovery in the Cloud, business continuity responsibility largely shifts to Vontas, and downtime is nearly non-existent. Azure includes several cost-effective, highly available, and secure services, such as Azure Site Recovery, which allows the agency to replicate their workloads to a secondary Azure Region. This allows the agency to fail over their Vontas products and move them to another physical location so they can focus on their business instead of supporting local infrastructure.
“Microsoft Azure provided the ability of standing up resources at more than one location”, Goff said. “Opting for our disaster recovery service enables the solution to fail over from one Azure region to another without the need for complicated process changes for their end users. Just a few clicks gets you the ability to stand up a second environment without the added cost of duplicate physical infrastructure and headache of managing those resources.”
The project included upgrading to the latest version of OnRoute and moving OnSite and OnBoard from on-premises to the Vontas Cloud. A project of this magnitude can be very time-consuming because it impacts so many areas of COTA’s business and so many of COTA’s stakeholders. Despite this, the COTA and Vontas teams completed this upgrade and Cloud migration within six months, with minimal issues and no impact on business operations.
“A project of this magnitude can be very time-consuming, Goff said. We were able to get it done in under six months. It involved quite a bit of training on the upgraded software, but we have a wonderful, experienced customer care team that provides ongoing support and resources as needed.”
“As COTA now looks forward again, we are looking to implement Vontas OnRoute Supervisor,” said Bartlett. “We will also develop more of a SaaS model, three to five years down the road for managing our software applications.”
Vontas OnRoute Supervisor is a modernized, web-based application enables supervisors to engage with dispatch and operators during operations by providing dynamic assistance and ensuring routes stay on schedule. The dynamic tool enables field support staff to swiftly address accidents, incidents, and customer inquiries at layover terminals, all while accessing vital operational data without cumbersome radio communication or mobility restrictions.
Vontas is in sync with these goals as we continue to modernize our OnTransit system architecture to support our many customers best as we drive into the future together.