KLM, which carries more than 23 million passengers each year, is using a new release of IBM's high-performance mainframe-based software (called "z/Transaction Processing Facility," or z/TPF) to manage its passenger inventory, check-in, flight information and freight reservations systems.
z/TPF is widely used in the travel, banking/finance, and public sector industries worldwide because of its ability to process up to tens of thousands of transactions per second from hundreds of thousands of end users.
"Management of extreme transaction volumes, high reliability and availability, fast response time, cost effectiveness and an open development environment are all very important to us," said Sven Postma, Vice President ICT Operations, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines. "The IBM System z mainframe and z/TPF contribute to maintaining our position as smart leader in the airline industry and makes us feel confident in our ability to serve customers as we move into the future."
KLM has leveraged many of z/TPF's benefits, including modernization of their development platform through an open-standards-based Linux development environment. KLM is using the platform-independent open tooling, common across its enterprise, to utilize the same set of skills required to develop agile, high-performance transaction processing applications on distributed platforms.
KLM's decision to migrate to z/TPF was an easy one, based on z/TPF's ability to easily accommodate future system expansion requirements, along with accommodating SOA for flexible enterprise application development and integration, and KLM's TPF business and financial model benefits.
KLM believes that its investment in their existing passenger inventory, check-in, flight information and freight reservations systems, while embracing open standards to support current and future development, will integrate their transaction-processing system into service-oriented IT environments.
About KLM
For more information on the airline, please visit http://www.klm.com.