IBM Corp has won a major Network Computer order from Carlson Inc’s Carlson Leisure Group, which is buying some 2,000 IBM Network Station NCs to run a new customer- focused application in every one of its UK high street travel agency branches. Carlson Worldchoice, which claims to be one of the largest UK travel and leisure companies, decided it needed to improve its customer-facing systems in its travel outlets, and completely re-wrote its applications using a 32-bit Windows environment with Netscape Navigator embedded into the application. Through a Java-enabled intranet and extranet system, the travel agent will be able to access and search data from all its suppliers – airlines, tour operators and the like – and offer customers much faster and more detailed information about holidays to suit their brief. Carlson will replace ten-year-old MS-DOS-based personal computers on a Novell Inc local area network, with the IBM NC’s and an Intel-based Netfinity 3500 server in each retail location. The company has some 400 of its own travel shops in the UK, plus another 20 or so franchised outlets. It also has some 600 independent travel agencies which have done a branding deal and will be known as Worldchoice. These are also evaluating the new system. Carlson Leisure’s group IT director Bill Donaldson said the company basically wrote the new system to improve efficiency in the branches, and then evaluated the deployment options. He said the company felt it could not cost-justify buying PC’s with Windows 95 for every agent, and cost of ownership overall was felt to be important. We didn’t set out to be thin client, Donaldson said, but once the company had got through the minefield of technology, it found the IBM Network Station option, using Citrix Systems Inc’s Winframe on the Netfinity server was right for what Carlson wanted today, and would also enable it to change its systems in the future. He said if the company decided to write Pure Java applications in the future, it would have the NC infrastructure in place. By having a server in each location, Carlson believes it will overcome network bandwidth issues by keeping a local version of the company’s main bookings application, while also benefiting from certain centralized services, as well as some web-based applications. The company will also maintain and distribute all software from a central server. The system will be in six pilot sites in August, going live in October with an initial 20 locations. The rollout into all the stores will be at a rate of 60 a month after that, Donaldson said.
