To understand their customers better, Cathay Pacific Airways Limited, Hong Kong, invested in a customer information system (CIS) that enables their staff to match corporate marketing and sales strategies and products more closely to the marketplace by unifying their separate databases into a single data warehouse.

Airlines are moving toward data warehousing as a business solution because it eliminates the need to link disparate legacy systems. It also saves costs because it reduces the number of databases throughout the company and the maintenance costs associated with them. Cathay decided it needed to consolidate information in legacy systems so it could match information about customers including booking, revenues, complaints, and customer profiles for marketing and advertising. Cathay is using the data warehouse for revenue management, target marketing, and customization of products and services.

Cathay tested platforms and chose Oracle 8 running on a Sun EnterpriseTM 6000 Server and StorEdgeTM Disk Array solution which suited their expansion goals set over four years.

To devise sales strategies, Cathay was anticipating more than one million booking records per month from Marketing Information Data Tapes (MIDT), commercially available data with booking information from all the major distribution systems used by airlines, including data such as bookings, personal data, names, flights, carrier, distribution system, and more. Cathay upgraded its equipment to handle the increase in data by purchasing three Sun StorEdge A3000 disk arrays with 378 GB of storage. In another upgrade, they purchased StorEdge A3500 disk arrays with an additional 635 GB of storage. Cathay also upgraded its Sun StorEdge L1800 tape library, adding two more tape drives for a total of four. Cathay is using Sun's Solstice BackupTM software.

There is additional information available online.

http://www.sun.com/storage/success-stories/cathay.html [...read more...]

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