Open Architecture Powers Business Growth At Jet Airways

Jet Airways has traditionally been on the Open Architecture. The principle benefits have been rolling out new applications and upgrades within the stipulated time frame and better concentration on the business demands. The Airline has leveraged the Open architecture to roll out the rolling agents check-in for the passengers at the airport; making effective use of the web services to offer services like calendar shopping and other additional services. R.N.Moorthy, GM-IT, Jet Airways speaking to Biztech2.0 shares the type of services offered by the IT team to the internal consumers, the DR Strategy and the mobile ticketing initiative.

What is the reason behind the strategy to have an Open Architecture?

From day one when we started expanding there was a clear vision to concentrate on the business demands rather than consuming time for in-house application development. The approach was to go with our technology requirements in the market and seek off-the-shelf products available and buy the best of the breeds that fulfilled the business demand. The products purchased are built on open source technology offering integration capabilities. We avoid buying applications that are legacy or proprietary in nature. Even the applications under development have a path for the future for doing a migration and are flexible enough to be integrated with other services.

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Which additional services have been rolled out leveraging the Open Architecture?

A couple of them. The first is the Rolling Agents-Check-in that we offer at the Airport. This is a service where a Jet Airways employee will issue the boarding pass with the help of a mobile device as the passenger is standing in the Check-in queue eliminating the time taken for checking-in the passenger.

The web-booking engine is able to provide a host of services just because of the Open architecture. We use web services for integrating the legacy applications with the open architecture systems. It helps the consumer to have flexibility in their booking pattern for example earlier we did not have the option to offer the best time and fare available (for a cost effective journey) to the travelers in case they did not have a fixed date in mind to travel. It is called calendar shopping. Additionally there are a lot more features that are available in our booking engine.

What kind of IT services are provided to the business by Jet Airways IT team?

The IT Architecture in any networked airline is a hybrid one. We have adopted an Open architecture. All the back office and customer facing applications are on the Open platform. The applications are either on the Unix or Linux platform with Oracle as RDBMS and Sybase, SQL at the DB level, so we do not carry the legacy applications like some of the older airlines.

The IT team is bifurcated into Business Application and IT Infrastructure.

The Business Application team support, maintain and automate the various business areas of the airline. Some of the applications are the core airline reservation system, departure control system, flight operations maintenance system, the frequent flier application and the revenue accounting system.

In all there are about twenty-five applications. The missions critical out of them are the reservation system, the departure control and the Operations. The Reservation system directly impacts the revenue in the eventuality of any malfunctioning or non-availability. The departure control impacts the customer. The key expectations from the business applications services group is that they work closely with the business and help in automating the processes, generating MIS for the functions and lastly in application integration. We don’t do core development working as a facilitator rather than developer thus shortening the time to roll out the applications.

The operations team that is responsible for the Flight dispatch uses the Operations system if the flight gets delayed it has a direct consequence on the customer and the cost incurred by the airline. The system enables the team to prepare the flight plan that has to be submitted to the ATC (Air Traffic Controller).

The other team supporting the Infrastructure handles data networking and maintenance,
procuring the IT infrastructure for newly launched locations - basically connectivity to the new station enabling access of business applications to the local users. We also provide the voice services providing telecom connectivity, mobile services and business application support services.

Which are the major Application Upgrades done in recent times?

Most of the initiatives have been ongoing. Our key focus is on coming up with the IT infrastructure at the new stations. Our Frequent-flier programme has been upgraded with online redemptions unlike before when the customer had to contact the call center to get their miles reduced from the programme.

We have rolled out the Jet Wallet application that equips the customer to avail mobile ticketing. This service enables the passenger to register himself and download the application on any GPRS enabled mobile and book the ticket, make the payment and he will get the intimation of the confirmation on his mobile and the e-mail ID and he can take the printout go to the airport, submit the boarding pass and get into the flight. So it is a fully secured application. The ticketing is processed on C-SAM’s MTS (Mobile Transaction System) technology platform.

How does the MTS application register the payment?

The application on the mobile asks for a set of credit cards for payment. Then through a secured connection, it validates the mobile number and once the validation and the credit limit is approved it will be processed as a normal transaction. In the reservation system once the payment is approved with the ticketing part, the customer gets the acknowledgment on the mobile informing the successful completion of the transaction along with the reference number.

What is your DR strategy?

The DR strategy for the airline is basically our key systems – Reservation and the Departure Control and Operations application have a DR built in by the service providers. We as an Airline need not bother about them. Our strategy has been ‘DR for business requirements’. We have taken a conscious business decision that only if an application requires a DR that there will be a DR for it. However applications that can be rebounded about eight hours after slowing down do not require a DR. The decision is taken on the basis of business requirements.

For all the other systems we have a back up in place that can be brought back on the basis of the business requirements.