COTA’ s Successful Migration to Vontas Cloud: Driving into the Future Together
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.
18 | BUSRIDE. COM | JUNE / JULY 2025