Europcar Mobility Group is leading the way in the mobility services space, with a comprehensive digital transformation to unify customer experiences across its brands, including Europcar, Goldcar, and Fox Rent A Car. In an industry where customer expectations constantly shift in line with technological progress, Europcar Mobility Group recognized the need to modernize its systems, scale their use of real-time data, and accelerate AI to enhance service delivery.

The challenge was to integrate data from three different ERP systems across various infrastructures as a stream into Confluent Cloud. This migration aimed to break down monolithic applications and transition to event-driven microservices, all while maintaining operational continuity.

As Luis Navarro, Head of Backend Engineering at Europcar Mobility Group, describes it: "It's like changing the engine of a car while it's still running at full speed."

Europcar Mobility Group’s Connected Vehicles program is a great example of the company's transformation journey. This initiative revolutionizes fleet management by using real-time vehicle telemetry data for applications that enhance efficiency and improve experience. These real-time insights can save millions of euros annually:

"Our Connected Vehicles program processes telemetry from vehicles to detect events like collisions, border crossings, and fuel levels," explains Isabel Cazorla, Tech Lead of the Connected Vehicles team. "This data provides concrete evidence for business use cases – like verifying a customer crossed a border that requires an additional contract clause, or confirming fuel levels when a vehicle is returned."

The Connected Vehicles teams had already been leveraging Lenses with their Amazon MSK deployment, experiencing significant productivity gains and enhanced visibility that had become essential to their workflow.

The migration to Confluent Cloud from Amazon MSK represents a critical step in this transformation, helping to reduce infrastructure costs while achieving greater business agility. However, migrating streaming data platforms comes with significant challenges; particularly maintaining visibility for engineers across environments and making sure development teams can work effectively throughout the transition.

The migration to Confluent Cloud presented Europcar Mobility Group with an opportunity to further enhance their developer experience with Lenses. Moving to a cloud-native platform created the perfect moment to establish a more intuitive, streamlined workflow for their engineering teams that would accelerate not just the migration itself, but all future development.

Europcar Mobility Group knew better tools would boost productivity during their migration. As longstanding users of Lenses, Isabel and team noted that relying on basic Kafka command-line tools slowed senior developers by about 30% and junior team members by up to 50%. This gap revealed a clear opportunity for efficiency improvements.

While Confluent Cloud provides tools for infrastructure teams, Europcar Mobility Group prioritized a rich developer experience by offering advanced tooling for monitoring, data exploration, and developer productivity. In particular, the Europcar On Demand team had integrated Lenses' SQL engine and data visibility features into their workflows, and were keen to maintain those capabilities throughout and after the migration process:

"Lenses was valuable to us before migration, is essential during our migration, and will continue to be central to our operations after moving to Confluent Cloud," says Isabel.

This migration presented the perfect moment to address these visibility needs, creating an opportunity to accelerate the development of new services and features while simultaneously executing their cloud transition strategy.

Europcar used the Lenses Multi-Kafka Developer Experience to provide a unified view across their Kafka environments, dramatically improving visibility for their engineering teams and lowering the barrier to migrate:

"Instead of having three separate teams working in silos, we've consolidated into one cohesive unit with consistent visibility across all our Kafka environments."

For the Connected Vehicles team, Lenses has become essential for daily operations. The intuitive interface allows developers to understand topic behavior, consumer patterns, and throughput at a glance, using a familiar language – SQL:

"When we encounter corrupted data or unexpected behavior, Lenses' querying capabilities help us pinpoint issues from the data source. Without Lenses, this process would slow our developers down significantly" says Isabel Cazorla.

Configuration and topic management through Lenses has also simplified tasks that would otherwise be complex and error-prone, such as modifying offsets and cleaning up deprecated topics. This has enhanced the team's ability to maintain a clean and efficient data environment.

Eduardo Martinez De Leon, Director of Software Engineering & QA at Europcar, emphasizes the importance of these capabilities to the business:

"At Europcar Mobility Group, our digital transformation strategy depends on our ability to deliver consistent, real-time services and AI capabilities across our brands – services that save us millions of euros annually."

"This supports our goal of unifying customer experiences and reducing operational costs through real-time data capabilities."

The impact on Europcar's operations has been transformative. Application delivery speed has increased by at least 50%, enabling the team to respond more quickly to business needs and accelerate their platform migration. When incidents do occur, the time to resolution has decreased dramatically.

"The visibility Lenses offers us has transformed how we work – when something happens in production, we can trace and resolve issues much more efficiently," explains Luis. "It gives us the confidence to explore and build faster and be more adventurous with our deployments. For example, our Connected Vehicles platform team in Barcelona deployed 234 changes last year with zero critical incidents, which demonstrates how a great Developer Experience like Lenses enables team autonomy and accelerates delivery."

With Lenses providing streamlined access to platform capabilities, Isabel's team of developers can efficiently manage their services without requiring specialized Kafka expertise for every task.

"Lenses simplifies our business-as-usual operations," Isabel notes.

This autonomy extends beyond just the Connected Vehicles team. As Lenses is rolled out to more teams across Europcar Mobility Group, it's enabling a shift in developer mindset toward greater ownership and responsibility.

"Having owners with visibility in all areas gives ownership to developers, and they take more responsibility in all the parts where the code and functionality have impact," says Isabel.

Looking ahead, Europcar Mobility Group plans to extend the use of Lenses from the Connected Vehicles team to the whole group, while accelerating their AI initiatives. This expansion will help standardize engineering practices and governance across diverse teams.

The team is also excited about extending their use of Lenses to further support their migration to Confluent Cloud. Isabel is particularly interested in the new Kafka Replicator, Lenses K2K: "I'm confident it will simplify the migration a lot. We're planning a proof of concept to see how it works for moving topics from our managed Kafka to Confluent Cloud."

Another promising use case involves replicatiang topics between environments to simulate real-life traffic for testing and problem-solving. "This will help a lot to reproduce real-life traffic and be able to solve issues or do testing, even run stress tests on our services," Isabel explains.

As Europcar Mobility Group continues to modernize to microservices around event streams, Lenses will remain an essential tool for standardizing engineering practices, promoting innovation, accelerating AI delivery, and providing consistent governance across teams:

"When you're trying to break down monoliths and transition to event-driven microservices, you need that real-time visibility into your data flows," concludes Luis. "Lenses provides that safety net that allows us to make these changes without fear. Without Lenses, our deployment speed would be much slower. It's been a critical factor in our ability to execute this transformation successfully."