AAA Changes Wheels While Driving 70mph: Virtualized Data Helps Implement New Organizational Structure and Delivers Flexible Information Architecture

AAA of Northern CA, NV, and UT, an automotive, travel, insurance and financial services provider, recently decided to separate its auto club and insurance divisions into separate companies with separate data centers. AAA's Information Management team realized they needed to avert data chaos in the short term by providing a buffer layer for managed migration of data and applications. For this they chose data virtualization. This also allowed them to maintain many existing data services to application and analytical users, while bringing up new services and changing the underlying data sources and structures.

Immediately after the separation they found numerous quick wins for this platform:

Speed integration by pointing ETL to virtualized sources
Agile BI
Expose spreadsheet and semi-structured data as virtualized databases to support desktop applications
Single customer views for cloud CRM

Building on tactical ROI, AAA is continuing to build a modern, scalable, flexible information architecture that can weather future changes and challenges.

Masha Bykin has 20 years of experience in IT and data management in a variety of industries, including contact center, software, and insurance. Her background includes software development, IT architecture, data warehousing, and data governance. She's been with AAA for 9 years, and is currently managing the team who develops all data services in the Information Management team at AAA of Northern CA, NV, and UT.

Anthony Kopec has over 15 years of experience in data architecture and data warehousing. He currently manages the Data Solutions and Architecture team at AAA NCNU (Northern California, Nevada, and Utah).