40 Years of APL and More than Half of This at Thomas Cook
Customer: Thomas Cook AG
Author: Uwe Schwagmeier
Country: Germany
Thomas Cook AG, in Oberursel near Frankfurt, Germany, is one of the leading travel companies in the world. Its shares are held by two large German enterprises. Half are held by Deutsche Lufthansa AG, Frankfurt and half by KarstadtQuelle AG, Essen. Thomas Cook AG was founded in 1998 as a union of the charter airline Condor, a former Lufthansa subsidiary, and the tour operator NUR Touristic (Neckermann Urlaubs Reisen) under the name C&N Touristic AG. After taking over the British Thomas Cook Ltd. in summer 2001, C&N Touristic AG was renamed Thomas Cook AG.
1985 - 86: Prototypes of Calculation Systems FlugNah and ABBF
In the early 1980's, NUR gradually developed a need for a calculation system. On one hand it had to support pricing, on the other it had to simulate a traveling season in the form of a profitability analysis. Traditionally mass business dominates the marketplace for short distance air travel holiday packages, while the marketplace for car, bus, and railway trips is dominated by multiple individual offerings. Both are characterized by an enormous number of variations, leading from an IT point of view to much higher requirements for processing and storage capacities. PCs available at that time were not a viable alternative. It was clear that only an IBM mainframe would be able to process such a task. Since the methods to simulate the season's profit calculation were still under development, a dynamic interpreted language like APL was the tool of choice. Thus the systems FlugNah (for short distance air travel packaged holiday) and ABBF (for car, bus, and railway trips) were developed with McKinsey consultants.
1986 - 91: Enhancement and Maintenance of FlugNah and ABBF
In the late 80's and early 90's, the systems had to be adapted again and again to fulfill market requirements for new travel products and pricing components. During that time, the systems also had to be migrated from VS APL to APL2, which with its new capabilities provided additional advantages over standard programming languages like Cobol.
1991: New Calculation System for Belgium
In 1991, a new calculation system, NVB, was developed for the Belgian market. APL2 proved its application development power; the system was implemented in just a few weeks by only one developer from Dittrich & Partner Consulting GmbH (DPC).
1992: Migration from VSAM to DB2
Formally this was only a technical migration, but it was a big step towards to data security. Thomas Cook used external Cobol programs called from APL2 as an access layer for DB2 because of their performance and security. This technique is still in use.
1994 - 1996: Replacement of ABBF by TABU and NVB by BELI
The old systems ABBF and NVB were replaced by the new systems TABU (for daily booking) and BELI (new Belgian system) which both had a lot of additional features. The work was again done in APL2 in cooperation with the companies DPC and a.k.e. During that time the travel market was growing much more dynamic, particularly in Belgium. NUR's response to these requirements was to offer several pricing editions each season. This is still mandatory today both in Belgium and Germany.
1999 - 2002: New Flight Calculation
In 1999 the FlugNah system (for short distance air travel packages) also had to be replaced. New requirements for long distance trips, discounts for early booking and incentives, and also integration of the purchase management system that was being developed in parallel required a complete redesign of the application. Technically the new system was supposed to use new technologies being adopted in IT during this time. Therefore Java was originally chosen as the programming language. But due to performance reasons all efforts to replace the existing APL2 calculation parts by Java components failed. Thus, a three tier architecture was finally chosen that consisted of a Java client and an APL2 calculation engine running on an IBM mainframe. The client and engine were connected by a special integration component using CORBA and XML protocols.
2004 - 2005: Downsizing Project to IBM Workstation APL2
The newly introduced Java interface of Workstation APL2 V2 provided new possibilities. The application was also suffering from a mainframe cost pressure. Thus the decision to migrate the application to Workstation APL2 V2 was easy.
2006 - ??: The Future of APL2 at Thomas Cook
After recently reorganizing, Thomas Cook is now tackling the coming years' new market challenges. In June 2006 Thomas Cook AG and IBM Germany signed a contract to develop a new IT platform called project GLOBE. This project is a completely new, international IT strategy at Thomas Cook. Its objective is the development of a common production platform for all Thomas Cook's tour operator brands. With this project, the enterprise is reacting to changes in customer behaviors and moving to a more efficient, more flexible and leaner production. With GLOBE it will be possible to package and individually price every travel package as soon as the customer asks for it, (dynamic packaging + dynamic pricing). The new IT platform is realizing the idea of a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Due to its integration with the IBM WebSphere Product Family, Workstation APL2 V2 is fully compatible with the new IT platform at Thomas Cook. Thus several parts of the existing calculation systems can easily be reorganized and integrated in other applications. Because of this, APL2 has the prerequisites to also participate in the future at Thomas Cook's IT systems for Tourism.
