CENDANT - 2006 JBOSS INNOVATION AWARD WINNER - PORTAL

Category: Portal
Winner: Cendant Distribution Travel Services Group, Inc
Submitted by: Brad Lindow & Jason Cohen
Industry: Travel
Geography: Chicago, IL

Overview

Selected for use of JBoss Portal to improve user experience, reduce transactions and reporting times, and reduce costs and overall development time in building myaccount.galileo.com, Cendant Travel Distribution Services’ portal was built to provide self service capabilities to thousands of travel agents and suppliers.

Download JBoss Innovation Award Submission
Download JBoss World Las Vegas Presentation

1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Orbitz is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Cendant Corporation and part of Cendant Travel Distribution Services division. The division that developed and is deploying JBoss Portal is part of the 8,500 person travel distribution services.

Orbitz is a leading online travel company offering leisure and business travelers a wide selection of low airfares, as well as deals on lodging, car rentals, cruises, vacation packages and other travel.

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

3. What was the desired solution?

Build portal for Galileo, the business unit of the Cendant Travel Distribution Services division. The Myaccount.Galileo.com portal is an interface for thousands of travel agents. The portal project was initiated to service these business customers better and automate manual processes.

The main functions needed for the portal are: Online Contract Renewal, Reports (running, scheduling), and Online Ordering. Administrators from each customers company can also manage their employees as they pertain to our portal (add users, delete users, add permissions).

Portal provides user customization including different views for different types of users (e.g. administrators, contracts, reporting). Also provides the ability to generate automated e-mail reports of activity, thus saving customers a significant amount of time.

Orbitz chose JBoss Application Server, JBoss Portal, Eclipse IDE, MySQL, and Pentaho; all open source products as well as Novell’s eDirectory. They also leveraged JBoss consulting, training, and the JBoss Subscription to assist with support and integration questions and issues. The entire project was completed in less than five months by a team of seven full-time technical staff and an average of three external advisors at any given time. The project successfully launched on January 30th, 2006.

See Innovation Award Submission for snapshots of the Galileo Portal Project

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.

The Orbitz team evaluated extensively several Portal vendors - both Proprietary and Open Source.
The main criteria in selecting the Portal platform were:

• Reputation of the vendor
• Previous experience with vendor’s technology
• Cost (initial and future license costs, support and maintenance costs)
• Certified and/or integrated products to avoid integration issues and costs associated with the project (including integration with Pentaho, MySQL, and Novell eDirectory)

Ultimately, Orbitz chose JBoss because of our previous experience and overall satisfaction with JBoss Application Server and because JBoss Portal was open source. Choosing JBoss Portal allows us to avoid costly product licenses. This cost savings will allow us to spend on headcount instead of paying money to vendors.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?
Clustered JBoss Application Servers Version 4.03, JBoss Portal Version 2.0, JBoss Eclipse IDE and EJB3.0 were all utilized in the solution.

JEMS was specifically used for the customer facing portal features. See diagram in innovation award submission. JBoss Portal is used for customization on the user side. It changes per profile of the customer depending if they are administrative, contracts or reporting.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

ROI savings – When comparing the JBoss Portal solution to their 2nd proprietary options, the total savings equal $600,000 for the initial year and $150,000 in maintenance for every following year.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
With the projected cost savings by choosing JBoss Portal, they did not count the money as a reinvestment, however a solution to keep expenses and cost down. They were able to keep the bottom line down which in return was a positive result on the headcount.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
Application Server – Clustered JBoss Application Servers Version 4.03
Portal Server – JBoss Portal Version 2.0
Database for use with Portal – MySQL 4.1
Identity Management – Novell eDirectory, Identity Manager, iChain
Reporting Server – Pentaho BI Platform
IDE – JBoss Eclipse IDE
Distributed Component Architecture – Enterprise Java Beans (EJB) 3.0

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

10. Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

Be willing to take a chance on open source projects. Realize that open source projects can be every bit as good as commercial equivalents without the expensive license fees. You will probably also experience much better overall support – via the combination of community support tools such as Forums and Wikis and the for-pay technical support offered as part of the JBoss Subscription.

Another nice thing about open source is the ability to write their own patches if necessary – something not possible with commercial/proprietary offerings that don’t provide the source code. When we have an issue, we don’t want to be at the mercy of a commercial vendor’s support organization to solve our problem. We like the ability to solve it on our own if we need to. We haven’t to date because the quality of JBoss Support has been excellent, but knowing that option exists is important to us.

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