© 2006 Zovaya Corporation All rights reserved. Virgin Atlantic Takes Control of Its Customer Data Commentary by Mathias Evin, Product Manager, Data Integration Solutions, Hummingbird Ltd. Virgin Atlantic, the United Kingdom’s second-largest airline, stores customer data from its frequent flyer program in many different transactional databases. To improve its decision support capabilities, Virgin deployed a data mart and uses Hummingbird’s Genio Suite™ to populate it quickly with clean, accurate data. Virgin Atlantic stores critical data about its frequent-flyer program in an OLTP database optimized for performance and transactional efficiency— but not for reporting and decision support. Not long ago, this system posed drawbacks for managers who needed to track customer activities and entitlements. They were often forced to pore over "canned," and sometimes incomplete, reports derived from multiple operational sources. It was clear to Virgin Atlantic’s MIS team that management needed a data mart. A timely, user-driven reporting system would centralize the data they wanted, meet their reporting requirements, and overcome the limitations of the source OLTP system. Today, Virgin Atlantic is in control of its customer data. With a click of a mouse, staff can analyze the latest trends in their customer base using an intuitive software interface that hides the complexity of the underlying corporate data. Few users outside the MIS department know that the data mart bringing this unprecedented flexibility to management’s desktops is fed by Genio Suite, a universal data exchange solution. More powerful and less expensive than "code generators," Genio’s unique broker-based combination of best-of-breed components reduces the total "throughput time" associated with moving data among various types of databases and decision-support systems. A key reason for Genio’s superior throughput is its capacity to simultaneously extract multiple sets of data from disparate data sources (DB2, VSAM, Oracle, for example). To prepare the source data that ultimately populates Virgin Atlantic’s data mart, Genio extracts snapshots of the transactional system and copies them into an operational data store or staging area. Then, through an intuitive, user-defined transformation process, Genio "reshapes" the transactional data into structures and values that are fed into a multidimensional database to facilitate management reporting and analysis. During the vendor-selection process, Virgin Atlantic—which doesn’t use COBOL in its MIS shop—ruled out code generators from the start. Since code generators tend to concentrate more on the extraction aspect of the data movement equation (as opposed to the transformation process), Virgin Atlantic focused its search on transformation engines and related tools from a variety of companies. Since then, Genio has generated tremendous benefits. For instance, its transformation engine saves time and money when moving data from system to system, often by improving programmer productivity—a major boon. "We could have gotten freelance programmers to do the work that Genio has done," says Jennifer Booth, head of Virgin Atlantic’s MIS department. "But given the current skills shortage, that would have been more expensive and time consuming." As well, Genio can populate Virgin Atlantic’s Essbase multidimensional databases. "With Genio, we could place the [operational data store] into any database we wanted, in our case Oracle," says Booth. "The other products we tested had proprietary repositories." Genio’s database neutrality allows MIS shops to leverage their existing database skills when building warehouses or converting applications. "Another feature we find indispensable is ‘impact analysis,’" says Booth. "If you make a change, if you delete a bit of code, Genio highlights all parts of the process you are building that will be affected by that change." Booth adds that this helpful feature is complemented by Genio’s maintainability, which is critical to Virgin Atlantic’s MIS team. "Each variable you create can be used in different scripts—which saves a great deal of time." The combination of these features, and the resultant enterprise solution, represents a truly valuable business benefit for Virgin Atlantic. Case Study Source: http://www.dw-institute.com/research/display.asp?id=5403 Company   |   Services   |   Partners   |   Clients   |   Career   |   Contact   |   Home © 2006 Zovaya Corporation. All rights reserved.