Washington Metro Area Transit Authority’s six-month migration to Microsoft Azure drives culture change and better service

The Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) serves more than 430,000 daily riders in and around Washington, DC, with rail and bus services covering northern Virginia, Maryland, and the District of Columbia. It maintains a large web of bus and rail operations, but its legacy IT systems relied on manual processes to find and analyze data and did not facilitate collaboration between departments. The existing IT infrastructure was contributing to a high number of maintenance calls, substantial overtime costs, and outages to key business and operation systems.

The DC metro system is vital to the region’s commuters and to its economy, and WMATA knew that outages could impact millions of people. In 2022, as the organization prepared to move to a new headquarters and new IT leadership came on board, it saw an opportunity to modernize and migrate to the cloud. WMATA had an existing contract with Microsoft, but Torri Martin, the authority’s Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer, quickly understood that it was underutilizing the technology company’s capabilities. “We realized that in partnership with Microsoft, we could digitize the organization and take ourselves forward into the future by moving more things to the cloud and using automation,” says Martin. “I’m a strong proponent of using industry leaders, and Microsoft is an industry leader, especially when you talk about security.” 

Migrating 11 critical infrastructure applications to Microsoft Azure in only six months

In modernizing its IT systems, WMATA wanted to improve the transit system’s safety, reliability, and resiliency within a secure network environment. WMATA and Microsoft began discussing a game plan to migrate critical infrastructure applications to Microsoft Azure. The authority would be able to use analytic capabilities like Azure Synapse Analytics to quickly see bus, rail, and safety system performance, and the visualization tools in Microsoft Power BI would help teams share metrics and provide leadership with the data they need to make more informed decisions.

One of WMATA’s key concerns was maintaining its existing hypervisor, VMware. It knew that this would deliver the fastest migration time with minimal disruption, and Microsoft used Azure VMware Solution to accomplish this goal. Presidio, a Microsoft partner with extensive experience in cloud migration, helped the WMATA team move critical applications to the new cloud-based solution.

With all the pieces in place, WMATA was able to move from concept to full migration of 11 applications that were critical to infrastructure in six months. It also began exploring ways to move in-house, custom-built applications to Microsoft Power Apps to modernize these smaller legacy applications and provide a platform for rapid, low-code application development.

“We were able to get rail and bus performance data into Azure, and we can use an Azure Synapse Analytics workspace to do the analysis instead of manually pulling information to put into a spreadsheet on a laptop,” says Tiffani Jenkins, Senior Vice President of Communications and Signaling. “Then, we can tie in Power BI, and with Microsoft’s investments in AI, we can pull in machine learning capabilities later.” 

Changing business culture and equipping employees with better data

As the new system has come online, WMATA is seeing a change in its business culture—a new openness to technological innovation. “Once we got the ball rolling, it really moved,” says Martin. “When we got these applications over and employees could see the ease of use and access and how we can scale it up and down as needed, everyone started clamoring to get their application into Azure VMware Solution or Azure.”

WMATA’s new data analysis capabilities give employees more timely and accurate information about transit performance, empowering them to improve safety and efficiency. The authority’s signal engineers and communication technicians are precious resources, and with automated systems behind them, they can now focus better on problems that demand their valuable expertise.

This new technological approach is part of a broader effort to make WMATA a model for big-city transit by increasing reliability, efficiency, and safety for riders. Data analysis in Azure helps the physical infrastructure teams take a more proactive approach to maintenance. Rather than waiting for system issues to occur, they can analyze data trends and allocate resources. “Good analytical data allows us to look at our system health performance and react faster so that we’re not waiting for a failure to tell us that we need to move,” says Jenkins. “We can see when the numbers are starting to trend in a way that means we should investigate.” 

Building reliable and resilient transit through digital transformation

Throughout its digital transformation, WMATA has found trusted support from Microsoft, and it is excited about future prospects and the benefits that riders are likely to see. With proactive maintenance minimizing outages and downtime, WMATA aims to provide more reliable and resilient public transportation to its customers. “I think our riders will get to experience more reliability, more on-time performance, better ride quality, and greater functionality and availability of key resources,” says Jenkins. “As a rider, I want to walk in and know that the train or bus will be on time so that I can plan my route and get where I need to go.”

WMATA is eager to explore the capabilities that AI services could bring to its system, from machine learning for data analytics to building digital twins of their trains and buses to improve performance. The company’s trust in Microsoft opens new technical possibilities. “Microsoft has been a true, trusted partner in this journey,” says Terrence Goines, Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. “The team has been phenomenal and gained my trust as a partner and advisor. When you find a partner you can really trust, the sky is the limit.”