The Emirates Group Flies High by Building Powerful, Open Travel Platform with JBoss Enterprise Middleware

The Emirates Group is a major player in the global aviation, travel, tourism, and leisure industries. Made up of more than 50 specialist businesses, the company employs 57,000 team members representing more than 160 different nationalities. The Emirates Group is the most comprehensive travel and tourism operation in the Middle East. At the heart of the Emirates Group are two business entities: Emirates airline and dnata. These two core divisions’ substantial growth has led to the creation of numerous ancillary businesses to service their operating requirements. In addition, the Group has branched out into the leisure and retail market, adding hotels and tourism firms to its ever-expanding portfolio. Established in 1959, dnata provides services in ground-handling, cargo, travel, IT solutions, and flight catering. It is the world’s fourth largest combined air services provider with a global footprint extending to 38 countries. Emirates airline has one of the youngest fleets in the sky and more than 400 awards for excellence worldwide. In the 2010-2011 financial year, the Emirates Group announced record net profits of US$1.5 billion.

For many years, the Emirates Group used proprietary infrastructures to support its mission critical systems and applications. The company develops in-house applications, which need to be updated regularly in order to add new functionality and improve customer service. In a proprietary environment, these developments can be expensive, as well as extremely time-consuming. This sometimes leads to roadblocks in technology innovation. In addition, the license and maintenance fees started to restrict the company’s cost management objectives.

With these issues in mind, the Group was looking to migrate to a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solution at an enterprise level--based on open source software. The platform, which was to be named the Open Travel Platform (OTP), was to host all travel-related services and mission-critical applications. The Group also needed technology that would not face any downtime and would be highly secure. These requirements were critical in supporting Emirates Group’s growth plans and its strategic objectives to rationalize, standardize, and reduce complexity across the organization.

After evaluating numerous technologies, The Emirates Group selected JBoss Enterprise Middleware and centralized all travel-related services onto one OTP. The mission-critical OTP has been implemented as a Tier 1 service that hosts multiple lines of business--including airport operations, passenger services, and leisure services.

The solution stack utilized to create the Group’s OTP is completely driven by open source technologies. Emirates selected JBoss Enterprise Middleware development tools, deployment platforms, and management environments. This includes the JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform (ESB), JBoss Enterprise BRMS, JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, and JBoss Operations Network. The Red Hat Global Support Services (GSS) team was involved from the inception of the project to its successful deployment.

“The Red Hat consulting team provided on-site support for tools evaluation, performance testing, architecture review, production infrastructure review, and production readiness,” said Neetan Chopra, vice president of strategy and architecture of Emirates Group Information Technology. “Red Hat worked diligently to ensure successful transfer of knowledge to the Emirates’ IT team, making the implementation a huge success.”

In addition, the Emirates Group worked very closely with Red Hat to execute the company’s vision and strategy, producing tangible, satisfactory results. “The Red Hat solutions and services team provided exceptional consulting and helped us successfully execute our project within the time frame and at the quality level needed,” said Mr. Chopra. “We also benefited greatly from the structured training that ensured we were fully up-to-speed and comfortable with our new OTP solution.”

Within the first year of launching the OTP, the Group implemented its first application that offers customers sophisticated travel planning and booking services via the Emirates internet booking engine, at http://www.emirates.com.

The company has already experienced several key benefits since migrating to JBoss solutions, namely making the customer experience a more engaging and streamlined process. In addition, OTP is expected to produce millions of dollars in cost savings and a two year payback across multiple projects. This helped the Group be recognized in the prestigious 2011 JBoss Innovation Awards, as a winner in the Carved Out Costs category.

“Even though achieving substantial cost savings was a significant accomplishment by the Group, partnering with Red Hat and utilizing the JBoss Enterprise Application Platform has also allowed the company to finally centralize all travel-related services onto one platform. This new platform enables value-added and context-specific business services, which are reusable across departments, making this initiative a huge success for the entire company."

Because of JBoss Enterprise Middleware, the new OTP not only helps save the IT group cost of development and maintenance, but also reduces turnaround time and the external expenditure of negotiating with multiple suppliers,” said Mr. Chopra. “Migrating from proprietary to open source technology provided by Red Hat reduces Emirates' total cost of ownership (TCO), and the IT infrastructure can continue to evolve without fear of costly vendor lock-in. We look forward to continuing our JBoss partnership and know that we can count on Red Hat to help drive our company’s future technology initiatives.”