Case Study: Voyages-sncf.com achieves faster time-to-market and reduced IT infrastructure risk with Amazon Web Services

Voyages-sncf.com - Customer Case Study

VSC Technologies, the technology subsidiary behind France’s Voyages‑sncf.com, runs critical reservation and distribution systems for SNCF and manages high traffic (more than 10 million unique visitors per month and €2.4 billion in business in 2009). The team needed a benchmark platform to develop and performance‑test a near‑real‑time, transactionally used data‑warehouse application, but their usual provider required eight months to deliver — so they turned to Amazon Web Services as an alternative.

VSC built an identical test environment on AWS using Amazon EC2, EBS, and S3 with a front tier (Tomcat/MySQL) and a back tier (Oracle/ODI), and benchmarked it with Apache JMeter and Cactus. The move shortened testing lead time (allowing tests three months before rollout versus one month with the prior provider), reduced infrastructure delivery risk, and proved AWS’s flexibility and capacity agility — prompting plans for a larger proof‑of‑concept including mainframe links and more transactional databases.

Voyages-sncf.com

Pierre Matuchet

Deputy General Manager, VSC Technologies