Windows AzureCustomer Solution Case Study

Online Travel Agency Launches Analytics System in the Cloud, Improves Service

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Hospitality industry—Travel services industry

Customer ProfileFounded in 1996, Travelocity provides online end-to-end travel offerings—including reservations for flights, hotels, and cars, plus destination information—to customers around the world.

Business SituationThe company’s Product Management Team requested that Travelocity collect website metrics on customer shopping patterns. It decided to deploy the application in the cloud to avoid burdening its own data center.

SolutionTravelocity chose the Windows Azure platform to host its business intelligence and analysis system. Within two months, it has moved its Java application to the cloud.

Benefits Reduces costs Improves customer experience Scales to meet demand Speeds time-to-market Enables flexible development

“The ability to quickly get new products to market turned out to be the important benefit of using the Windows Azure platform.”

Vinay Moharil, Director of Mobile Development, Travelocity

Travelocity is an online travel agency that connects millions of travelers with airlines, hotels, car-rental companies, and other services. In March 2010, the company’s Product Management Team requested that, within three months, Travelocity begin collecting information on how customers used its website. The Architecture Team had already developed a proof-of-concept business intelligence and analysis system. Travelocity decided to develop the system for the cloud to avoid burdening its own data centers. Within two months, it moved the Java-based system to the Windows Azure platform. Travelocity exceeded its own expectations and is experiencing a shift in its development paradigm, making it possible to experiment with offerings and improve the customer experience. It also benefits from reduced costs, reliable scalability, a fast time-to-market, and a flexible development environment.

SituationIntroduced in 1996, Travelocity is an online travel agency and wholly owned subsidiary of Sabre Holdings, a private company. Sabre Holdings connects more than 57,000 travel agents and millions of travelers with more than 400 airlines, 90,000 hotels, 30 car-rental companies, 200 tour operators, and dozens of railways, ferries, and cruise lines. Travelocity is based in Southlake, Texas, with additional offices in New York City, San Francisco, San Antonio, and abroad.

Travelocity’s main objective is to provide end-to-end travel solutions—including air reservations, hotel reservations, car rentals, and destination information—to its customers through the company’s website. “Travelocity delivers value to customers who are seeking the perfect travel experience,” says Vinay Moharil, Director of Mobile Development at Travelocity. “It’s about delivering experience, not just price. People travel because they want to be a part of a place and its culture.”

Because Travelocity is available to everyone, the company has to make sure that its system is scalable enough to handle large volumes of website traffic on demand. It needs the site to run 24 hours a day so that customers around the world can book reservations in a timely fashion. “The main problem we address at Travelocity is scalability,” says Ramon Resma, Principal Software Architect at Travelocity. “We want to be able to scale when we introduce new products that increase the demand for technology resources. In general, we need to provide enough scalability to address two or three times the volume of traffic that we expect.”

Travelocity also wants to retain customers by providing a good web experience.

Before introducing new features to its website, Travelocity has traditionally had to make sure that its data center could handle the increased load. The company currently operates three data centers in the United States with hundreds of servers. Whenever Travelocity wanted to add new applications to its on-premises server infrastructure, it needed to add servers. “It takes time to add servers to the data centers. We have to procure them, configure them, and test them,” says Resma. “It’s a challenge to balance load requirements to ensure the capacity to scale into our infrastructure.”

In March 2010, the company’s Product Management Team requested that Travelocity begin collecting metrics to show how customers use the flight shopping application. (See Figure 1.) Travelocity had already developed a proof-of-concept business intelligence and analysis system to analyze user behavior. Using data from this system, Travelocity could gain an understanding of what customers were looking for, when they were shopping, and their history of shopping patterns. Through the system, Travelocity could log page views, data points, and requests from its web pages. It could employ web analytics to understand customer patterns and use this information to optimize the website experience based on popular options. For example, it might discover that customers tend to sort flights by price or by departure time. By building this capability into its technology, the company could help customers find more rewarding travel experiences and feel confident about travel planning.

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“With the emergence of Windows Azure-based computing, businesses will shift from having multiple small silos of computing power to moving that ‘brain’ to the centralized locations.... IT professionals can’t afford to ignore the cloud—or they’ll be left behind.”

Vinay Moharil, Director of Mobile Development, Travelocity

“We had already developed a proof-of-concept business intelligence and analysis system that answered the question, ‘What is this customer looking for?’ With that information, we can customize messaging and experiences,” says Moharil. “From an IT perspective, it’s a complex problem to solve. But that’s what our customers expect of us.”

To satisfy its partners’ wishes, the company needed to incorporate the business intelligence and analysis system into its services. Travelocity needed storage capacity to collect data. It also needed the computational ability to discern what data is useful, and highly secure methods to safeguard the resulting metrics.

Travelocity uses asynchronous JavaScript (AJAX)-based in-browser processes on its website to make explicit requests of the web server. An AJAX-based webpage can pass information back and forth with the web server more quickly and seamlessly, making a site more dynamic. “A lot of our web applications use AJAX-based web technology and HTML5, a language for presenting content on the web, so processes and user interaction take place in the browser,” says Resma. “Once an interaction—say, a sorting or filtering event—takes place in the browser, it doesn’t necessarily go back to the server. We needed the business intelligence and analysis system to collect metrics on browser activity while avoiding putting extra demands on our data center servers to monitor such analytics.”

The partners had asked the company to implement a fully developed business intelligence and analysis system solution within three months, and Travelocity had a limited budget. “We decided to host the application in the cloud to divert the collection of information away from our on-premises data center,” says Resma. “Also, because we needed the application running in such a short period of time, it was the perfect scenario for a cloud solution.”

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Figure 1 – The Travelocity air shopping application

SolutionTo get its business intelligence and analysis system running in the cloud, Travelocity had to find a suitable cloud platform, design its system to operate in the cloud, and package and deploy it.

Choosing a Cloud PlatformTravelocity had already begun reviewing cloud computing services that could support its Java-based business intelligence and analysis system, which makes it possible to collect and analyze information about browser interactions. When Travelocity considered making use of the Windows Azure platform from Microsoft, it discovered that its system could easily fit into that cloud model with minimal changes. “When we started looking at the capabilities of Windows Azure, we realized that it justified everything that we were thinking about cloud computing,” says Moharil. “We realized we could keep our trade secrets on-premises and deploy the new system in the cloud. We could maintain our privacy policies, take advantage of the platform’s elasticity, and experiment with customer-facing functionality.”

The Windows Azure platform provides a foundation for online product and service offerings to help make complicated tasks simple across a dynamic environment. Windows Azure, a cloud services operating system, serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Developers can take advantage of the technology’s on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage web applications on the Internet through Microsoft data centers.

Travelocity uses Windows Azure to provide compute power and storage for its business intelligence and analysis system. In doing so, it avoids burdening the capacity of its on-premises infrastructure, which primarily handles applications that need access to the company’s infrastructure. “Windows Azure is not just a cloud platform. It also presents opportunities for developers to create more impactful applications because they’re only dealing with services. Windows Azure provides facilities for monitoring server performance, memory usage, CPU usage, and so on,” says Resma. “The platform also manages to the day-to-day maintenance and overhead that our IT professionals would have to manage otherwise. Plus, it’s backed by the trustworthy Microsoft brand, so we don’t have to worry about whether it is scalable or globally available.”

Developing for Windows AzureThe company spent a few weeks designing the business intelligence and analysis system to work in the cloud. To import web traffic data, Travelocity uses Windows Azure Blob Storage to store text or binary data and manage gigabyte-sized logs of analytical data. “We take advantage of the scalability and reliability of Windows Azure,” says Resma. “We had to make sure that the cloud could handle a large volume of traffic and that it would scale.”

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“Windows Azure is not just a cloud platform. It also presents opportunities for developers to create more impactful applications because they’re only dealing with services.”

Ramon Resma, Principal Software Architect, Travelocity

Travelocity was able to easily move its Java-based system to Windows Azure by taking advantage of the tools that Microsoft provides. (See Figure 2.) For example, to ready the system for the cloud, developers used Apache Tomcat solution accelerators available with Windows Azure. The accelerators package the code instantly as one blob. “The ease of deploying a Java-based application to the Windows Azure platform surprised us,” says Resma. “Windows Azure is basically a Windows server. We’re deploying Java in Windows.”

The company spent three weeks testing the system on a staging server. One challenge that Travelocity developers faced was negotiating with the proxy servers. All of its development servers are behind a firewall, and external connections must go through a proxy server. To deploy to the Windows Azure platform, it had to use a server sited outside the proxy intermediary. Another challenge was that some developers were using the Windows XP operating system, and most of the Windows Azure tools work only with Windows 7.

To host its application, the company employs a special build of Internet Information Services (IIS) 7.5—the web server role in the Windows Server 2008 R2 operating system. It uses IIS instead of the Apache HTTP Web Server, which it was accustomed to using, because that is the default Windows Azure platform web server role. IIS provides support for PHP, a scripting language used to produce dynamic web pages. It also supports ASP.NET, a web application framework from Microsoft that allows programmers to build dynamic websites, web applications, and web services.

Implementing Cloud-Based ServicesBy May 2010, Travelocity had implemented the customer business intelligence and analysis system on the Windows Azure platform. Deployment to the cloud took just minutes, and Travelocity set up two instances of its application in Microsoft data centers. Within a few hours of turning it on, the system had already stored a gigabyte of user data.

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The company likes that the Windows Azure platform allows it to streamline packaging the system for release. By this means, Travelocity avoids having to access and configure the server—as it would need to do with other cloud providers—before the system is deployed to production. “It was a huge surprise how easy it was to deploy on the Windows Azure platform,” says Moharil. “Once the package is loaded into storage, it’s pretty straightforward. Microsoft oversees the infrastructure issues around security, global distribution, and capacity—so we don’t have to worry about that.”

Travelocity will continue to deliver core reservation services from its on-premises data center because that process collects sensitive customer data. However, the company is planning to implement other services to the cloud in steps over the next few years. For example, it intends to migrate components of the Travelocity mobile website to the Windows Azure platform. “Mobile developers love the Windows Azure platform because they need to test mobile applications on the Internet,” says Resma. “They can rapidly deploy and test applications in the cloud within a matter of hours.”

BenefitsThanks to cloud computing, Travelocity has fulfilled the Product Management Team’s requests for a system that collects metrics on customer interactions. The company is also experiencing a paradigm shift in its development efforts. Because Microsoft manages the servers, configuration, and maintenance, Travelocity is able to build and deploy applications on a per-month subscription basis. It reduces costs while reaching its large customer base. The company also benefits from the enormous scalability offered by Windows Azure, which ensures that customers from around the world can access Travelocity’s services reliably. Plus, because of a faster time-to-market and a flexible development environment, the company can experiment with new offerings and enhance the customer experience.

“With the emergence of Windows Azure-based computing, businesses will shift from having multiple small silos of computing power to moving that ‘brain’ to the centralized locations,” says Moharil.

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Figure 2 – The Windows Azure platform

“Eventually, compute power will be a utility like electricity or water. IT professionals can’t afford to ignore the cloud—or they’ll be left behind.”

Reduces CostsWith its business intelligence and analysis system in the cloud, Travelocity pays for only the server capacity that it needs. It avoids the cost of purchasing and configuring servers and testing functionality. “Running our applications on Windows Azure is a good complement to using our on-premises infrastructure,” says Resma. “It’s cost-effective, and it’s easy and fast to deploy. Plus, any competencies you can achieve in your own data centers can be done just as well or better in Microsoft data centers, with less investment.”

Improves Customer ExperienceTravelocity discovered that cloud computing gives them the opportunity to develop new business models and improve the customer experience. “When you look at all the capabilities that Windows Azure provides—compute power, scalability, elasticity, service, security, and time-to-market—they all work well together,” says Moharil. “It allows us to deliver new services in the cloud while keeping the servers that run our trade-secret technology on-premises. These capabilities drive decisions about how to serve our customers and when to launch new products.”

Scales to Meet DemandThe company relies on the on-demand scalability of the Windows Azure platform because traffic on its website varies from hour to hour. “Windows Azure is the technology we were looking for,” says

Moharil. “The compute power gives you the elasticity to manage large quantities of data. The ease of deployment means that you can add customer services quickly and scale as needed.”

Speeds Time-to-MarketThanks to Windows Azure, Travelocity has been able to quickly and easily launch its business intelligence and analysis system using familiar development tools. It deployed the system in two months—a month faster than the requested three-month timeframe. The interoperability of Windows Azure with Travelocity’s Java-based system helped ensure that the company would exceed expectations. “The ability to quickly get new products to market turned out to be the important benefit of using the Windows Azure platform,” says Moharil. “With Windows Azure, we were able to package the system, deploy it to the cloud, and turn it on a month ahead of our scheduled timeline.”

Enables Flexible DevelopmentCloud computing frees Travelocity developers from dealing with client–server issues and managing server capacity, which means they can experiment more freely and quickly implement updates. “By using Windows Azure, we can run multiple scenarios and find out which one delivers the best results,” says Moharil. “We can incorporate changes to the system and rapidly deploy those updates to the cloud. We achieve greater flexibility and agility in our release, deployment, and analysis processes.”

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Windows Azure PlatformThe Windows Azure platform provides developers the functionality to build applications that span from consumer to enterprise scenarios. The key components of the Windows Azure platform are:

Windows Azure. Windows Azure is the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. It provides developers with on-demand compute, storage, bandwidth, content delivery, middleware, and marketplace capabilities to build, host, and scale web applications through Microsoft data centers.

Microsoft SQL Azure. Microsoft SQL Azure is a self-managed, multitenant relational cloud database service built on Microsoft SQL Server technologies. It provides built-in high availability, fault tolerance, and scale-out database capabilities, as well as cloud-based data synchronization and reporting, to build custom enterprise and web applications and extend the reach of data assets.

To learn more, visit: www.windowsazure.comwww.sqlazure.com

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about Travelocity products and services, call (682) 605-3000 or visit the website at: www.travelocity.com

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

Document published May 2011

Software and Services Windows Azure Platform− Windows Azure

Microsoft Server Product Portfolio−Windows Server 2008 R2