In an effort to drive new revenue, EmpireCLS Worldwide Chauffeured Services’ Chief Information Officer, Alan Bourassa, adopted a bold strategy of offering his company’s innovative dispatch and reservation system to its competitors. The cloud service offering, called BeTransported.com, is powered by Microsoft private cloud technologies: Microsoft System Center 2012 and Windows Server 2008 R2 with Hyper-V.

More than 13,000 ground transportation companies around the world could benefit from EmpireCLS’ dispatching service. Bourassa believes the software as a service (SaaS) model offered through a public cloud could grow to represent and support 40 percent of the company’s revenues within the next three years.

“Anything we can do to streamline and automate IT tasks and eliminate human effort speeds up our service to the business and makes us more successful,” Bourassa said. “With Windows Server and System Center our IT staff has more time to sit down with the business and strategize new products and services. When the business asks, ‘Do we have capacity for a new business like BeTransported.com?’ we can unequivocally say ‘Yes!’”

EmpireCLS’ proprietary dispatch and reservation system enables dispatchers to assign the right car and driver, monitor their progress using GPS and real-time traffic updates, and deliver an invoice when the assignment is complete.

EmpireCLS first used System Center 2012 to transform its virtualized data center into a private cloud environment, dedicated to its core chauffer service business. Once its private cloud environment was in place, EmpireCLS used a portion of it to launch a public cloud environment, which spawned the creation of BeTransported.com.

“These new services are enabling us to grow our business and would not have been possible without a cloud environment,” Bourassa said. “Microsoft did a very good job of creating one integrated toolset to help companies deploy a private cloud infrastructure with automated, orchestrated processes.”