“I favor the Professional Open Source model JBoss uses as it drives a technical meritocracy which improves quality and excellence of the JBoss platform.”
-Jack Wang, Managing Director of Technology, Continental Airlines.
“We’ve found a high-quality, easily scalable server that can match our business growth, as well as superior professional service from the expert developers behind the technology.”
– Michael McDonald, Director of Technology, Continental Airlines.
Project Overview: "Work Hard. Fly Right." has been the theme of Continental Airlines’ advertising campaign since 1998 because it reflects the way they do business. Continental Airlines serves more destinations worldwide than any other airline, including more international destinations than any U.S. airline. BusinessFirst was rated the #1 Business Class among all U.S. airlines by readers of Condé Nast Traveler. In addition, Continental Airlines flies to more nonstop destinations from their hubs to Latin America than any other carrier.
In a few words, Continental Airlines is focused on customer service and utilizes IT to achieve that goal. They use IT to ensure accurate ticket and boarding processing, ensuring the planes are cleaned at the right times and enhancing the customer travel experience.
Challenge:
Continental has MS Windows, various UNIX’s (include LINUX), HP NonStop and IBM mainframe platforms. It wants to develop and deploy custom applications on all of these platforms.
They needed to develop Java and J2EE skills.
Continental wanted to improve its web site and travel status communication customer experiences.
Solution:
Used JBoss documentation, software and training to learn J2EE and JBoss. The two courses were - Introduction to JBoss and JBoss for Administrators combined modules in a 5 day on-site training session.
Built two new applications on JBoss Application Server that are key components of the “Reservation-to-Travel” lifecycle
Ticket Reissue – Manages the ticket reissue process from web site interaction through database updating.
Traveler Alert – Sends alerts to Continental OnePass member travelers signaling news on their flights such as delays, cancellations, etc.
Deployed these applications on 24 dual-processor HP ProLiant servers communicating with an Oracle database on the back-end and thousands of users on the front-end.
Became a JBoss Platinum Support customer for JBoss Enterprise Middleware System (JEMS) to reduce cost maintaining and servicing their JBoss platform deployments.
Results:
Customer experience was improved from old process for receiving up to date travel status and ticket changes
Continental leveraged various OS platforms that they already were using more effectively
The enterprise POJO development model supported by JBoss made their programming job easier and required less time than commercial vendor EJB platforms
Continental likes JBoss’ community development process. This process produces a more consumable, and modular platform that enables them to serve the business better and faster.
