Continental Airlines Optimizes Its IT Infrastructure With HP
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For most of us, taking a plane trip involves finding the best fare, dealing with security, choosing a comfortable seat and hoping someone will be there to pick us up at our final destination. For the airlines, however, a three-hour jaunt from Houston to New York involves much more work: Cost-per-ticket projections, scheduling comparisons, flight planning, maintenance reviews and fuel allocation analyses – just to name a few of the multitude of operations.
Without the benefit of the detailed information provided by such functions, an airline is at a distinct disadvantage. In the currently supercharged aviation industry environment, Continental Airlines decided to accelerate the return on investment for its information technology projects by performing a strategic IT consolidation and infrastructure re-design. It turned to a trusted partner, Hewlett-Packard Company, to provide a proven mission- and business-critical solution.
In 2001, Continental started to consider IT consolidation as a means of removing the barrier of physical data center space. However, after the devastating events of September 11, 2001, the airline faced some severe financial issues as passenger-per-flight rates plummeted across the industry. Continental manage-ment reacted swiftly by formulating a new philosophy mandating that all approved projects would require a pay-back period of less than one year.
Dan Morales, Managing Director of Financial Systems for Continental Airlines, explained, "The emphasis on a quick ROI changed our philosophy on which systems to consolidate. We repositioned our IT consolidation efforts toward a corporatewide, enterprise solution that we could use to help lower the ROI period on five applications currently under development."