IBM provides s/w support to Dutch airlines

AMSTELVEEN, NETHERLANDS: IBM on Monday announced that KLM Royal Dutch Airlines has become the first airline to fully deploy IBM's newest System z mainframe-based software for processing ultra-high volumes of real-time business transactions such as flight reservations.

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, said a press release.

"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. KLM has leveraged many of z/TPF's benefits, including modernization of their development platform through an open-standards-based Linux development environment.

It 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.

The airlines service provider 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, would integrate their transaction-processing system into service-oriented IT environments, added the release.