Major Airline Boosts Web Site Service While Cutting ...



Overview

Country or Region: United Arab Emirates

Industry: Transportation

Customer Profile

Based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, and with 20,000 employees, Emirates Airlines is one of the fastest growing airlines in the world, with more than 200 international awards for excellence.

Business Situation

Emirates wanted to increase the scalability of its frequent-flier Web site to support an expected 100 percent increase in visitors, as well as enhance the services it provided through the site.

Solution

The company used Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0 to integrate Web and smart-client versions of the solution and provide greater scalability and functionality.

Benefits

■ Cuts development time, budget 50 percent

■ Enables “write once, deploy many times”

■ Provides a 100 percent performance gain

| | |“Visual Studio 2005 made our developers incredibly productive. We got everything we wanted out of our solution with Visual Studio 2005: scalability, speed, customization, and ease of use.”

Haider Alogaily, Technical Support Manager, Emirates Airlines

| |

| | | |Emirates Airlines wanted a solution that would make its frequent flyer Web site increasingly useful |

| | | |to its program members, as well as scale to support the increased demand. With Microsoft® Visual |

| | | |Studio® 2005 and the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0, Emirates got that and more. The new |

| | | |solution cut development time and expense in half, saving six months. It will support a 100 percent |

| | | |traffic increase to 50,000 visitors per day while boosting responsiveness 100 percent. A single set |

| | | |of reusable business objects will support smart clients, Web browsers, Web services, and mobile |

| | | |devices—as well as give Emirates faster time-to-market with every additional .NET-connected solution |

| | | |it creates. |

| | | | |

| | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

The Web site provided a broad range of self-service options for current members as well as enabled new members to join the program. The program had a member base of more than 1.7 million members, 70 percent of whom were active users of the Web site, making some 25,000 visits per day. That success had come quickly—the current site was launched in 2001 and had consistently won awards as the best regional and global frequent-flier Web site.

“The Web site has become the most effective, fast, and cost-effective way to reach out to our members,” says A. T. Srinivasan, Vice President, Information Services, Emirates Airlines. “It gives our members up-to-date and speedy answers proactively. It helps to retain members and also increase their loyalty to the brand. is a complete one-stop resource for account and journey management for our members.”

The happy problem that Emirates had was that the Web site was becoming so popular that its use was projected to double to 50,000 unique visitors daily by 2008—and the company’s IT professionals doubted that the underlying application could handle that load, for which it had not been designed.

The Web site was based on what, by 2005, was an earlier generation of Microsoft® Windows Server System™ integrated server software, including the Microsoft Windows® 2000 Server operating system and Internet Information Services (IIS) version 5.0, Microsoft Commerce Server 2000, and Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000, with Web pages served up by Active Server Pages (ASP) technology. The Web site and its underlying business logic had been created using the Microsoft Visual Basic® version 6.0 development system.

“From time to time, we were experiencing slower responses on the site than we wanted because the solution hadn’t been built to handle the load we were experiencing,” says Srinivasan. “We didn’t want to keep adding more hardware. We wanted more efficiency and performance without additional hardware purchase and maintenance costs.”

In addition to efficiency and performance, Emirates wanted to add personalization and customization features to the site to make it more useful to members; they wanted to enhance the security of the site; and they wanted the flexibility to continue to make those changes over time, without being locked into whatever upgrade or change they would adopt to replace the existing site. To truly gain efficiencies in software development, Emirates also wanted to be able to reuse whatever new code it developed in its other development efforts, such as its upcoming revenue accounting solution upgrade.

In addition to the Windows-based Web site, a separate version of the software, called the Customer Relationship Manager Information System (CRIS) ran as a client/server application for Emirates customer service agents around the world. That application was written with Oracle development tools and would require a separate development effort to upgrade—leaving Emirates with two unconnected applications to manage.

Yet another consideration was that Emirates didn’t merely use CRIS as its own customer relationship software. The company’s Mercator software development subsidiary also offered CRIS for sale to other airlines. In addition to needing to provide those customers with a more scalable solution, Mercator also wanted to drive down the time and cost of customizing the solution for each deployment.

Solution

When Emirates decided to upgrade the CRIS application and Web site in 2005, it faced a choice: Emirates developers had experience both with the Java 2 Platform Enterprise Edition and with the Microsoft .NET Framework, an integral component of the Microsoft Windows operating system that provides a programming model and runtime for Web services, Web applications, and smart-client applications.

“CRIS wasn’t written in .NET technology, but we had gotten lots of experience with the .NET Framework over the past few years,” says Fayyaz Alam, Manager, Information Services, Emirates Airlines. “This was a chance to upgrade CRIS to .NET as well as our first chance to write an application using the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system.”

At the core of the new solution is the application logic, based on business objects written in the Microsoft Visual C#® 2005 development system and Visual Studio 2005. Unlike the previous version of CRIS, the new logic is shared by both the Web and Windows-based versions of the solution (see Figure 1). XML-based Web services connect the solution to a variety of external services, including credit card validation, currency converter, baggage tracer, news feeds, weather feeds, and visa and health information. The server side of the solution runs on the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 operating system.

The Web version of the solution accesses the business logic and delivers Web pages to members and other visitors through Microsoft Web Forms. For customer service agents, Emirates has replaced the client/server architecture with an intranet-based smart-client application that accesses the same business logic used by the Web site application. The presentation tier for both versions was written using the Microsoft Visual Basic .NET development system.

The solution has two database components. The Web site content and site configuration database is based on SQL Server 2000 and is accessed by the business logic using Microsoft data access technology. Member profile information is maintained in an Oracle database and accessed through a data portal that uses technology and the Oracle Data Provider for .NET. The use of the data portal is an example of a pluggable, loosely-coupled distributed architecture that the Emirates project team designed into the new version of the solution. It gives Emirates the flexibility to replace distributed components and service technologies without having to rewrite application code.

The member profile database is hosted at Emirates headquarters in Dubai; the Web application and database is hosted in London. Data moves between the sites using .NET Remoting over 64 Kbps Frame Relay. The pluggable nature of the solution will allow Emirates to easily replace the communications technology with the Microsoft next-generation communications technology, code-named “Indigo,” when that technology becomes available.

The solution was developed over a six-month period in mid-2005 by a 10-person development team at Emirates. The solution was tested at Microsoft Labs, and the new Web site went live in October 2005.

Benefits

The Emirates team found that their new solution was both faster and less costly to create than it would have been with another development system, and provided the performance and usability benefits they were looking for. Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework version 2.0 also set the stage for faster time-to-benefit with every new solution the developers create.

Cut Development Time and Budget 50 Percent

“Thanks to Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0, we cut our development time in half,” says Haider Alogaily, Project Manager, Information Systems, Emirates Airlines. “That saved us six months.”

Alogaily credits a range of features in Visual Studio 2005 for that savings. For example, the development team made extensive use of Generics, which facilitated code reuse, thus reducing the amount of code to be written and speeding the development process. Similarly, Master Pages and Themes made it faster and easier for the developers to provide a consistent look and functionality to the 100 pages of the Web site.

Both security and the development schedule were helped by out-of-the-box membership features in Visual Studio 2005, such as log on and change password functionality, which could be implemented with simple drag-and-drop operations. In addition to being able to write less code, Alogaily praised tools—such as the enhanced debugger—that operated far faster than previous versions; that provided more features, such as the dataset snapshot; and that operated without the need for local IIS servers on the developer stations.

“Visual Studio 2005 made our developers incredibly productive,” says Alogaily.

Enables “Write Once, Deploy Many Times” Solution

The biggest long-term productivity gain that the Emirates team got from Visual Studio 2005 was the ability to create .NET business objects that will run on the array of devices and environments that Emirates targets with the solution, including Web browsers, smart clients, Web services, and mobile devices such as Pocket PCs and smart phones powered by Microsoft Windows Mobile™ software. The Adaptive User Interface feature, for example, meant that the team didn’t need to write different controls for the different devices on which the solution would run.

“There are lots of elements we wrote only once, rather than re-creating them for each target device or use,” says Alogaily. “We truly have one code base and a ‘write once, deploy many times’ solution.”

Alogaily expects the productivity boon will extend beyond the various devices that Emirates intends for CRIS and . As part of the development project, the team created a complete application framework which enabled the developers to focus on the business problem at hand rather than worry about writing plumbing code. It will also provide the basis for future solutions, such as a new revenue accounting software package that Emirates plans to create in 2006.

“We are going to see faster time-to-benefit on every application we write,” says Alogaily. “And every time we take advantage of the application framework we created for CRIS, we’re driving our development costs down even lower.”

Features in Visual Studio such as ClickOnce deployment also make it faster and easier to deploy and maintain the smart-client portion of the solution. That benefit will pay dividends not only at Emirates, but also at every third-party deployment of the solution undertaken by the company’s Mercator subsidiary.

Enhances User Experience with 100 Percent Performance Gain

One of the company’s key goals for the new version of the solution was to enhance the end-user experience in three ways: with scalability that would ensure availability for the anticipated 100 percent increase in Web site traffic, with greater speed that would give users better responsiveness, and with new features that would make the solution easier and more useful.

“We got everything we wanted out of our solution with Visual Studio 2005,” says Alogaily. “Scalability, speed, customization, and ease of use.”

For example, based on stress testing with beta software at Microsoft Labs, Alogaily expects that the new solution will service up to 1,000 requests per second, 100 percent more than it saw with the former solution. A significant part of the speed enhancement comes from the user interface cache, which reduces the number of round-trips that have to be made to access data. Similarly, data validation in the user interface enables customer service agents to correct data entries without requiring the data to first make a round-trip to the database to be validated. Together, these changes will boost the responsiveness of the solution for customer service agents, who need to manage customer calls as productively as possible.

Beyond greater performance, the solution makes it easier for both customer service agents and members to use it. For the agents, for example, n-level undo allows them to quickly undo typing with the ease associated with the undo function in Microsoft Office Professional Edition software. For Web site users, every page element they see is served by based on user preferences, making the site more useful and relevant to each member than before.

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 is the world’s most popular development environment for designing, developing, and testing next-generation Windows®-based solutions and Web applications and services. By improving the development experience for Windows, the Web, mobile devices, and Microsoft Office, Visual Studio 2005 helps organizations deliver a variety of solutions more productively than ever before. Visual Studio Team System expands the product line with new software tools that enable greater communication and collaboration throughout the development life cycle. With Visual Studio 2005, businesses can deliver modern service-oriented solutions more efficiently.

For more information on Visual Studio 2005, go to:

msdn.vstudio

Acquire Visual Studio:

msdn.vstudio/howtobuy

Microsoft Windows Server System

Microsoft Windows Server System is a line of integrated and manageable server software designed to reduce the complexity and cost of IT. Windows Server System enables you to spend less time and budget on managing your systems so that you can focus your resources on other priorities for you and your business

 

For more information about Windows Server System, go to:

windowsserversystem

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“Thanks to Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0, we cut our development time in half. That saved us six months.”

Haider Alogaily, Technical Support Manager, Emirates Airlines

| |

Figure 1. The Web and Windows versions of the Emirates solution share common business logic, created using Visual Studio 2005.

[pic]

“There are lots of elements we wrote only once, rather than re-creating them for each target device or use. We truly have one code base and a ‘write once, deploy many times’ solution.”

Haider Alogaily, Technical Support Manager, Emirates Airlines

| |

“We are going to see faster time-to-benefit on every application we write. And every time we take advantage of the application framework we created for CRIS, we’re driving our development costs down even lower.”

Haider Alogaily, Technical Support Manager, Emirates Airlines

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| |Software and Services

■ Microsoft Visual Studio 2005

■ Windows Server System

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition |Microsoft Visual Basic 2005

■ Microsoft Visual C# 2005

■ Technologies

− Microsoft Internet Information Services 6.0

− Microsoft

− Microsoft | |

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation.

All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Microsoft, Visual Basic, Visual C#, Visual Studio, Windows, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published November 2005 | | |

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For more information about Emirates Airline services, visit the Web site at:

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