PROGRESS SOFTWARE: Travel, Transportation and Logistics - Global eBook 2010

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> TRAVEL,

TRANSPORTATION AND LOGISTICS

Global Press eBook 2010

www.progress.com


CONTENTS computing.co.uk 3 CIO Zone 4-5 Integration Developer News

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The Machinist 8-13 CIO 14-15 DNA 16 IT Business Edge

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Der Mobilitats Manager

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Le Monde Informatique

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Linea EDP 20 DeLloyd 21 LNEWS 22


computing.co.uk

AIR FRANCE-KLM STREAMLINES BOOKING SYSTEM BY DAWINDERPAL SAHOTA DATE: SEPTEMBER 10, 2010 Air France-KLM Airlines has imple- mented new technology to better streamline its reservation handling systems. Following the merger of KLM with Air France in 2004, KLM recognised that it had an increasing amount of complex IT systems that needed to work together. The airline is using Progress Soft- ware’s Actional Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) Management platform to increase the availability of its reservation systems and to help resolve technical problems quickly if they arise. “We wanted a way to simplify services so we could pinpoint issues when they happened, and where the problem was in the infrastructure,” said Hans Rietman, ICT production manager at KLM. He explained that the company had significant numbers of monitoring tools and homegrown solutions in place and that it needed technology that could work across the entire reservations systems of the newly merged company. With the Actional SOA Management platform, Air France-KLM IT staff will be able to collaborate across their newly merged enterprise to detect, diagnose and repair problems that could disrupt flight operations and reservations systems, and prevent them recurring. “Although we are still in the implementation phase, we now expect to have greater availability, improved troubleshooting and innovation. We also hope to reduce development costs,” said Rietman. “We are using Progress Software’s technology at operational level for improved booking facilities as 24/7 availability needs to be up all the time. Progress Software’s technology will enable this and bring us a quick return on investment.”

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BEYOND BI: REAL-TIME BEYOND BI: REAL-TIME DYNAMIC RESPONSES BY TOM GROENFELDT DATE: AUGUST 3, 2010 High-speed analytics originally devel- oped for trading in financial markets are now being used to support real-time dynamic decisionmaking in the telecommunications arena, shipping ports and airlines, among others.

CIO Zone

In 1872, Gijs Dirkzwager monitored the progress of sailing and steam ships at the Hook of Holland and dispatched their estimated arrival time to Rotterdam by horse messengers. His company, now Royal Dirkzwager, today provides electronic monitoring of ship movements around the world. Some cargo lines still run their ships at high speed, only to have them sit at anchor for 20 to 30 hours because no space is available at the dock -- a waste of fuel. With Royal Dirkzwager, they can monitor both ships and ports to run their vessels at maximum efficiency and still reach the port at an opportune time for unloading. In the future, Royal Dirkzwager expects to offer more sophisticated services by linking information about port traffic, tides, fuel consumption and insurance rates to help owners calculate how fast to sail and whether, for example, the Suez Canal is more cost-effective than sailing around the piratethreatened Cape with its higher costs for fuel and insurance. The maritime service is using systems from Progress Software, including its Sonic Enterprise Service Bus, which competes with Tibco, and its complex event processing engine. Capable of handling a thousand events per second in real time, the new system can gather complete data about shipping movements all over the world. Clients subscribe to information about specific ships, based on virtual lines drawn around any given location on the map. British Airways is using Progress to link data from hundreds of systems to improve operations and make sure its most valued customers are treated well, while 3 Italia, an Italian mobile phone operator, uses it to check the credit of prepaid customers while they are making a call. Progress calls it responsive process management, or RPM. Unlike business intelligence, which analyzes events after they take place, RPM runs its analytics in real time to enable a business to respond while the events are unfolding. “Customers want to understand what is happening in their business in real time so they can dynamically respond to opportunities and threats,” explained John Bates, general manager for Progress’ Apama division. “They need visibility across a range of systems including transactions, business processes and complex event processing as part of their operations.” Royal Dirkzwager is saving its customers tens of millions of dollars a year because they aren’t burning fuel uselessly, added Bates. Before deploying Progress to track vessels, ships were radioing in their positions, but sometimes the port wasn’t ready, or the ship didn’t arrive as expected and resources were underused.

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The Progress system uses service-oriented architecture to pull data from existing applications, much of it on legacy mainframes, so it does not require firms to rip and replace their existing technology. British Airways wants to achieve situational awareness, to understand what is going on in time to respond to high-value customers. If a flight arrives late and the high-value passenger makes the connection but his bag doesn’t, BA can spot the problem and automatically send him a text saying the bag will arrive at his hotel at 10 p.m. that evening, assuming he had booked the flight and hotel through the same system. That requires linking the booking system, the flight systems, and the customer loyalty programs and then tying in a communications application to send out a text or e-mail. At 3 Italia, the systems couldn’t keep up with 12 million customers. Configured to let calls go through if they didn’t have credit information to stop the caller, they were leaking revenue. 3 Italia is one of the first telecommunication providers in Europe to implement a single charging system for pre- and post-paid services of voice, video, SMS and data. The billing system handles large amounts of data from multiple gateways. “We effectively put real-time credit checks in the call data stream,” said Bates.

CIO Zone 5


AIR FRANCE-KLM USES PROGRESS RPM FOR MORE RESPONSIVE SOA BY VANCE MCCARTHY DATE: SEPTEMBER 14, 2010 Air France-KLM Airlines is using Progress Software’s ResponsiveProce ssManagement(RPM) suiteto improve agility and real-time responsiveness of its SOA-based systems for operations and customer reservations. The project is enabled by Progress’ Actional SOA Management platform. With Actional SOA Management platform, Air France-KLM will be able to detect, diagnose, and repair and other wise respond to a host of problems that could disrupt their flight operations as well as reservations systems. Further, the Progress RPM diagnostics will allow airline officials to prevent similar system failures from happening again, ac- cording to Hans Rietman, ICT Production Manager Connectivity at KLM.

end-to-end and in real- time, he added.

IDN

The benefits will also extend directly to custom- ers, according to a top Air France-KLM executive. “E-Booking systems need to be up and running 24x7. By increasing real-time visibility with... Actional, we are able to guarantee 100 percent availability for booking systems,” Rietman said in a statement. “We can monitor the environment, detect any un- usual activity, then react and respond accordingly.” Initially the Actional product will be implemented to monitor and govern the airline’s Electronic Booking Tool (EBT),

Air France-KLM chose Progress RPM’s Actional SOA management product for its enterprise-class features and functionality, its tool which has a modern look and feel, and wide range of functionality, Rietman added. Progress’s RPM suite, of which Actional is one key component, is designed to render enterprise SOA infrastructures “operationally responsive,” which allows SOA assets to provide IT and business managers valuable capabilities, including:

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• Real-time Visibility: Proving employees and business managers comprehensive insight into your business events, business transactions and business operations as they occur. • Immediately Sense and Respond: Allows IT and business to have a more global view of events, and reveals how these eventspr esentopportunities,threatsorinefficiencies. Oncestaffhavethismorepreciseunderstandingofevents, theyare more empowered to take action. • Continuous and On-going Ability To Improve Business Processes: Easily modify current business processes to continuously meet or exceed key business objectives. “By increasing real-time visibility with...Actional, we are able to guarantee 100 percent availability for booking systems.” Hans Rietman ICT Production Manager Connectivity KLM “With Progress, Air France-KLM will be able to respond to changes in their business much more rapidly than before,” said Joshua Nor- rid,Progress’IndustryVicePresidentforTravelandLeisure. TheProgressRPM’sActionaltechnologieswillallowtheairlinetoquickly address many types of change, he added, including continuous revenue pressure, volatile fuel prices and even disruptions to air routes caused by weather or even the recent volcanic ash cloud. “[Their] ability to monitor, detect, react and respond is now greatly improved, which will help them gain and maintain competitive advantages,” Norrid added. Before KLM merged with Air France in 2004, it realized it had to find a way to integrate the many heterogeneous systems from both companies, without having to undergo an expensive “rip and replace.” Company officials wanted a monitoring solution for the entire ITinfrastructuretomeetneedsofcustomers,businesspartnersandemployees.accordingtoofficials. AirFrance-KLMwillinitiallyuse the Progress Actional Enterprise for Business Transaction Assurance from Progress’ RPM suite. The airline will roll out the product to three data centers. TheAir-FranceKLMpactisProgress’latestwinintheaviationsector. Latein2009,BritishAirwaysannounceditwoulduseProgress’ RPM suite as a “key part of its travel program to upgrade its IT systems,” helping BA integrate more than 600 different electronic systems and processes.

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The Machinist

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The Machinist

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The Machinist

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The Machinist

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The Machinist

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The Machinist

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THE MOVE TO MORE RESPONSIVE AIR TRAVEL BY GILES NELSON DATE: NOVEMBER 16, 2010

CIO

I last wrote about airlines earlier this year, particularly with respect to Lufthansa’s use of innovative location based social networking technology to bring a new level of responsiveness to customer relations. Here, I’m going to revisit airlines again, motivated by an airline customer who recently talking about their IT vision. At a recent Progress Software event in the UK, Gordon Penfold, Chief Technology Officer of British Airways (BA), spoke about BA’s recent evolution of their IT infrastructure. This is an ambitious and far-reaching programme, eventually replacing IT systems that date back to the introduction of the Boeing 747 40 years ago. The result will be a single real-time infrastructure linking a total of 600 systems spanning retail, customer, operational and corporate data and processes. The airline industry globally is still in a very difficult place. In 2009 it experienced losses of nearly $10 billion with a fall in revenues from 2008 of around 15 per cent. Therefore the squeezing out of operational efficienciesand the raising and differentiating of customer service is key to an airline’s survival. More often that not, systems within airlines are siloed - operations, ground, crew, customer, reservations and revenue. Technical integra- tion between these systems is the exception rather than the rule. This leads to issues in having the right visibility into the end-to-end processes that the airline performs. When an airline experiences “irregular operations” - for example a delay caused by weather, or a baggage handling problem or a passenger failing to board - the problem in not having this visibility is exposed. Late departure from a gate may result in an additional delay as the take-off slot is missed. Late arrival at the destination airport means that ground crew may be in the wrong place. Crew members may exceed the legally permitted flying hours therefore requiring a change in crew before the aircraft takes off again. Without proper integration between these systems corrections to an irregular operation may be haphazard and occur too late to stop problems cascading that affect more flights. Delayed flights mean a loss of efficiency and crew and aircraft not being where they should be, which in turn leads to higher costs, lower revenues and a loss in customer satisfaction. The technical integration of these systems is the first step. This allows messages, or events, of interest to be communicated in

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real- time and reliably between them. In BA’s case, this is now in production. With the Airbus A380 and the Boeing 787 Dreamliner coming into service, having an event driven messaging system in place creates new possibilities. These aircraft are full of electronic telemetry systems and these can communicate back to ground based systems as a plane is flying. As BA has described, an aircraft could, during a flight, signal that a repair to a particular system is required. This information can be fed directly into an SAP maintenance and repair system. Therefore, by the time the aircraft lands, the parts and engineers could already be in place to effect the repair so ensuring the aircraft is returned to service as quickly as possible. Technical integration is a necessary first step. Beyond this, value can be really enhanced by providing more seamless business level views of what’s going on.

CIO

Here’s one scenario, as described to me by a BA executive. Imagine a number of aircraft from the same airline, stacked-up, waiting to come into land at one of the airline’s main hubs (imagine Heathrow in the case of BA). Stacking usually means that airport capacity has been exceeded which in turn means that there are going to be delays, not only in arrivals but also in connections and subsequent flights of those planes being held. What airlines would like to do is to dynamically prioritise stacked flights so the one with the highest “value” or the flight that will create the greatest downstream benefit lands first. Consider a flight with a large proportion of passen- gers from a long-standing and valuable corporate customer. Let’s say that those passengers are on a short-haul flight due to connect to a long-haul. Furthermore, let’s say a gate is scheduled to become available which is nearby the departure gate for the long-haul flight. When taken together, these might result in the airline requesting to air traffic control that this flight lands first. If control accedes to the request the benefits of this are many - customer service is enhanced because passengers from a valuable corporate client have a better chance of making their flight and less disruption occurs to both the airline and the airport - with passengers and luggage being physically nearer the ongoing flight, the large number of connections can be achieved more efficiently. Airlines seriously envisage that such a scenario will become a reality. Operational, ground, customer and revenue functions need to work together and need to do this in real-time. They need to be responsive to what’s happening around them. And not only to be able to react to the events as they happen but to involve people at the right time in the decision making process. This is a great example of the whole concept behind responsive process management that combines event processing and business process management to create reactive but person oriented processes that are typically executed using many existing systems. In other words, it provides a platform for dynamic application development, where, instead of applications being monolithic and static, they remain fluid and so can evolve as processes, the business and the market evolves. It will be interesting to see how these developments with airlines continue. They’ve had a hard year, what with ash clouds, employee strikes and even the latest terrorist threats. But, it’s clear even looking at just the BA case that they’re still striving to be the best at what they do and deliver an optimum service to their customers and be responsive to their needs.

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October 30, 2010

DNA 16


IT Business Edge

NFORMATIVE SLIDESHOW, 8 SLIDES & DESCRIPTIONS NOVEMBER 30, 2010

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HOHE VERFÜGBARKEIT DES RESERVIERUNGSSYSTEMS AIR FRANCE-KLM STELLT MIT PROGRESS ACTIONAL EINE NAHEZU 100 %IGE VERFÜGBARKEIT SEINES ONLINE-RESERVIERUNGSSYSTEMS SICHER. DATE: SEPTEMBER 7, 2010

DMM

Progress Software, ein führender Anbieter von Unternehmens-Soft- ware, hat mit der Air France-KLM Group einen neuen Kunden aus der Reisebranche gewonnen. Die Fluggesellschaft sorgt mit der SOA-Management-Plattform Progress Actional für mehr Transparenz und höchste Verfügbarkeit ihres Online- Reservierungssystems. „Das Tool bietet eine moderne Benutzeroberfläche und passt sich reibungslos allen Gegebenheiten an“, berichtet Hans Rietman, ICT Produc- tion Manager Connectivity bei KLM in Amsterdam. „Der hohe Wettbewerb- sdruck in der Reisebranche erfordert, dass die Buchungssysteme rund um

der Lage, eine nahezu hundertprozentige Verfügbarkeit der Buchungssysteme zu gewährleisten.“

die Uhr verfügbar sein müssen. Indem wir die Transparenz mit einem proaktiven Tool wie Actional verbessern, sind wir in

In einer ersten Phase wird Actional zur vollständigen Überwachung und Echtzeitsteuerung des Electronic Booking Tools (EBI) von KLM in drei Rechenzentren eingesetzt. Für die Zukunft ist der Einsatz in der gesamten Air France-KLM Group geplant. EBI ist ein einfach zu bedienendes und flexibles Buchungssystem für Kunden, und es erlaubt den Mitarbeitern der Fluggesellschaft, sich auf die zusätzlichen, wertschöpfenden Services zu konzentrieren. Als Ergebnis ist die Fluggesellschaft jetzt in der Lage, Schwierigkeiten und Hindernisse in den Abläufen schneller aufzudecken und zu beseitigen - was letztlich dazu beiträgt, die Kundenzufriedenheit zu steigern.

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HOHE VERFÜGBARKEIT DES RESERVIERUNGSSYSTEMS AIR FRANCE-KLM STELLT MIT PROGRESS ACTIONAL EINE NAHEZU 100 %IGE VERFÜGBARKEIT SEINES ONLINE-RESERVIERUNGSSYSTEMS SICHER. DATE: SEPTEMBER 7, 2010 Le groupe aérien en cours de fusion de ses SI a choisi Progress Actional Enterprise for Business Transaction Assurance. Depuis la fusion des groupes aériens Air France et KLM en 2004, la réorganisation des systèmes d’information se fait progressivement. Il s’agit de faire interagir les SI hétérogènes des deux compagnies sans les remplacer globalement, stratégie trop coûteuse.

Le Monde Informatique

Pour y parvenir, le principe adopté est celui de la SOA (Service Oriented Architecture). La DSI d’Air France devait disposer d’un outil pour détecter, diagnostiquer et traiter les problèmes survenant dans les SI. Et cela malgré le grand nombre d’outils utilisés dans les proces- sus métiers les plus courants, de la réservation d’une place par un passager (éventuellement via un tiers) à l’organisation d’un vol. Chaque processus est ainsi extrêmement complexe. Les systèmes au coeur de l’activité du groupe aérien doivent pourtant être disponibles en permanence. Pour réaliser cette surveillance des interconnexions au sein de l’architecture SOA, Air France KLM a choisi de se doter d’Actional de Progress Software. Cette solution a été intégrée pour l’instant sur le système e-commerce de KLM et devrait être déployée ensuite sur l’ensemble du SI du groupe. Le coût du projet n’a pas été dévoilé.

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