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Continental Airlines
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Posted: Thursday, February 10, 2000
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Company Profile
As part of its overall deployment of Microsoft® Windows® 2000, Continental Airlines rolled out the operating system to two of its Level 1 airports in November 1999 to support vital applications at ticket counters and gates. Not only does Windows 2000 provide a reliable platform that enables Continental agents to serve customers efficiently, but it also cuts desktop setup time by 50 percent. In addition, it is projected to reduce the number of servers at corporate headquarters by 20 percent and to help Continental avoid approximately $1.2 million per year in the cost of personal computer moves, adds, and changes throughout the enterprise.
Airlines are constantly looking for ways to gain efficiencies while still improving service. Continental Airlines, the fifth largest airline in the United States, has found that the best route to accomplish those seemingly conflicting goals is through improving its technology. As of the end of 1999, Continental had achieved 18 consecutive profitable quarters as well as high customer satisfaction ratings, and it continues to look to technology to help it maintain that competitive edge.
By deploying the Microsoft Windows 2000 Server and Windows 2000 Professional operating systems throughout its enterprise, Continental expects to continue to deliver high levels of customer satisfaction, as well as cost-efficient operations. With Windows 2000 already implemented at two airports, the company has begun to realize real benefits, including:
 | Reliable and efficient access to more information at the gate and ticket counter |
| A significant reduction in desktop setup time and support and maintenance costs |
A Rapidly Expanding Pilot
Before deploying Windows 2000 to any airports, Continental tested Windows 2000 Professional and a scaled-down version of its Windows 2000 Server architecture in the lab with a very small group of users for about three months. That was followed by a larger pilot of Windows 2000 Professional to about 300 desktops throughout the corporate headquarters in Houston, consisting of several key executives—Continental’s President, the Chief Information Officer, the Senior Vice President of Human Resources, and the Director of the Systems Operations Coordination Center—as well as most of those in the Information Technology (IT) department.
Continental migrated its existing Windows NT® 4.0-based Domain Name System (DNS), Windows Internet Naming Service (WINS), and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) to Windows 2000 Dynamic Domain Name System (DDNS), WINS, and DHCP for all of corporate headquarters and a few remote sites. Meanwhile, the deployment team began to build a new Windows 2000-based domain infrastructure using the Active DirectoryTM service, to run in parallel with the Windows NT 4.0-based operating system domain. The company decided to create this parallel system because its existing systems had evolved from combining several islands of LANs located all over the enterprise that needed to be streamlined.
"There's a lot we would like to change on our existing environment," explains Eric Craig, Continental's manager of Distributed Systems. "The architecture looks a lot like its heritage, which is a loosely woven together series of departmental LANs. So now we want to put a lot of thought into an enterprise-wide design. There's a lot of clean-up effort that I want to do and the parallel infrastructure allows us to do that."
When Craig began to see the impressive results yielded by the initial pilot test in reducing administration and support time, the company decided to step up its plans and start deploying the operating system to its airport operations. "It didn't take long to begin to see the cost savings and the value of Windows 2000," recalls Craig. "I went back to my management team and said, 'We should deploy this as quickly as we can'."
Supporting Vital Applications at the Airport
Throughout the pilot phase, Windows 2000 proved its reliability with very stable performance and the fact that it required fewer reboots on both servers and desktops when adding new applications and devices. That reliable performance gave Continental the confidence to deploy the operating system at two Level 1 airports—Dallas/Ft. Worth and Tampa—to support its vital EZR application, just as the busiest travel season got into full swing in November 1999. EZR is a graphical front end to the mainframe reservation and customer service system, and eventually it will replace Continental's "green screen" mainframe terminal-emulator application in all airports. The new graphical interface, along with the server component Airframe, provides agents at the gate and at ticket counters with more information, so they can better serve customers.
Reliability is a key issue for the airport implementations since agents need to be able to access the system at all times in order to serve customers efficiently. "I took a big chance when I migrated the core of my network to Windows 2000 and I’m happy to say that it has paid off. The fact that Windows 2000 has proven to be more stable than its predecessor is very, very important to us," Craig adds. "It fits in with Continental's overall effort to provide complete customer service at any point of contact."
In addition to supporting EZR, Windows 2000 Professional provides Continental's back-office staff with a scalable foundation for e-mail and productivity applications. Features such as the Offline Folders functionality, which enables users to work on documents offline and then automatically synchronize those documents with those on the server, adds to the reliability. These features also help maintain the integrity of the data and enable users to keep working, should they lose network connectivity.
A Choice of Deployment Options
Each of Continental’s operations at each hub and Level 1 airport has its own LAN, which connects to the headquarters in Houston over a WAN frame relay connection. Continental deployed Windows 2000 Professional to its Dallas/Fort Worth airport operation using the Remote Installation Services (RIS), a new feature of Windows 2000 that allows customers to roll out Windows 2000 Professional from a central remote location. "We did the Dallas implementation of Windows 2000 Professional on 100 desktops entirely with RIS and the performance was very impressive," Craig says. "We were doing installs on 24 machines an hour, and that was limited only by the fact that we only had 24 ports," recalls Craig.
For Tampa, Continental had its system integrator create a standard workstation image—which includes Windows 2000 Professional and productivity applications—and install it on all the desktop computers prior to shipping. "It's definitely less costly to use RIS than to pay the integrator to setup the image, but there are some airport operations where we don't have the space or time to stage the equipment, so we need both options," Craig notes. When Continental deploys Windows 2000 over the next year to three of its hub airports—Houston, Cleveland, and Newark, which have several hundred desktops each—it will preinstall the desktop image on the computers before shipping them. Continental will continue to use RIS for quick replacement of desktops in break/fix or refresh situations. This will enable the IT staff to set up the new systems much faster in the busy hub operations.
The fast setup with Windows 2000 is a critical benefit, especially for the airport deployments. Craig estimates that the dynamic system-configuration tools built into Windows 2000 cut setup time by at least half compared to previous versions of Windows NT.
"You don't have to do as many reboots. And with RIS I'm able to pump down an image with a tremendous amount of material on it already, so I don't have to go back and install software," Craig explains.
At Tampa, Continental upgraded from a mixture of Windows NT Server 4.0 and Windows 95, and in Dallas/Ft. Worth, it introduced a new Windows 2000 environment to replace the 3270 dumb terminals. Windows 2000 Server was rolled out to six servers, two in a cluster, at each of those airports from a system disk that included the core Windows 2000 Server configuration.
Craig estimates that loading the software on the unclustered servers took about 40 to 45 minutes per server. He credits the short installation time largely to the fact that Windows 2000 doesn't require as many reboots during installation and to the unattended installation technologies that come with Windows 2000.
The Tools to Meet an Ambitious Deployment Schedule
With the first phase of airport deployment completed, Continental plans to roll out Windows 2000 and EZR to its three hubs and two more Level 1 airports by the end of 2000. The airline will also move the core of the network and about 1,500 corporate users from Windows NT 4.0 to Windows 2000 by the second quarter of 2000. For that deployment, Continental will rely on several management and deployment tools and technologies that are included with Windows 2000 Server, including:
| New IntelliMirrorTM management technologies, which provide users with roaming profiles so that their settings follow them to any desktop or laptop computer used within the corporate network or connected remotely. This reduces the support required while giving users immediate access to their data as they move from site to site. |
| Active Directory service enables Continental to move users from its multiple directories in Windows NT 4.0 to a single directory in Windows 2000 and to synchronize all e-mail within that one directory. Continental is also integrating its Human Resources system directly into Active Directory to automate account management. This means that if an employee is moved in an organizational unit within the HR system, that employee will be moved automatically in an organizational unit in Active Directory. If the properties of that account change, such as a name change due to marriage, that change will be reflected in the directory as soon as it has been made in the HR system. Continental is also using Active Directory to assign people to certain distribution lists and security levels in order to define their level of access to resources. In addition, Active Directory will query the HR system daily for terminations, through a Visual Basic®-based application, and will disable automatically all such accounts in the directory. This will provide tighter security, help to reduce administrative costs, and free up staff to perform more strategic tasks. "This offers all kinds of really cool possibilities that can lower our management cost per user," Craig notes. |
| The Remote Administration mode of Terminal Services, which enables Continental to troubleshoot and manage its servers from its Houston headquarters. This is projected to reduce administration costs by 10 percent. |
Forecasting Significant Savings in Administration Costs
Continental will manage all server computers remotely using the Terminal Services Remote Administration function in Windows 2000 and will manage all desktops using Microsoft Systems Management Server. This is expected to reduce management costs significantly. "Whenever we buy a PC, several costs are tacked on before the PC actually arrives at the desktop. The standard image has to be loaded, people's data have to be reassembled, and so on. It was running $300 to $500 per desktop whenever there was a crash or whenever somebody moved," Craig recalls. With Windows 2000, Continental's ultimate goal is to enable any Continental employee to rebuild a desktop after a rebuild, move, add, or change, using RIS and Systems Management Server, and without requiring expensive IT resources.
"If you add up our total number of installed PCs, and say a third of them get refreshed every year, it was running about $1.2 million to add, move, or rebuild these desktops. And that didn't even include reclaiming the lost productivity of the people doing the work. Now, instead of taking six hours to rebuild a desktop, it takes under an hour because of the tools in Windows 2000," Craig says.
The remote administration capabilities in Terminal Services also make it more cost effective for the company to centrally manage its servers.
Reducing Training Time
The deployment of Windows 2000 Professional at the airports is, in some cases, introducing users to a completely new environment. "We're extending the system to some people who have used only the green-screen applications," Craig explains.
To bridge that experience gap, Continental's internal airport-field-services group provides on-site training, which includes about half a day of training on Windows navigation and another half a day on the EZR application.
Expanding Possibilities
The strong reliability and eight-way symmetric multiprocessor support in Windows 2000 Server is also helping to expand the possibilities for new applications. Because modifying applications on the mainframe is extremely expensive and time consuming, Continental constantly looks for other ways to implement new applications. "In the past, if we wanted to pull something off the mainframe that was fairly large, typically we would put it on the UNIX box. We wouldn’t have even considered Windows, and now we are because Windows 2000 provides more scalability and the reliability we need, plus it supports much faster, more flexible development," Craig notes.
Craig also expects to be able to consolidate servers when Windows 2000 goes into production. "Because Windows 2000 is a lot more reliable and supports more people, we can cut down the number of servers that we have," Craig explains. He estimates that at a minimum they will be able to eliminate 20 percent of their existing Windows NT-based servers at corporate headquarters.
Future Plans
Because EZR does not yet support all the functions required at the airport, Continental agents will continue to have access to the terminal emulator for some functions, such as accessing flight information from other airlines. To simplify the configuration of the terminal emulator, Craig plans to take advantage of the Active Directory service in Windows 2000 to store all the configuration information for the terminal-emulator application as a computer object in Active Directory.
"This way, if a manager needs to move a PC from one gate to another, rather than calling Field Services to go out and reconfigure it, all they have to do is rename it and the directory will provide all the data that the terminal emulator needs to configure itself," Craig says. "Our goal is to be able to transfer to fairly non-technical, supervisory people the ability to manage and run the environment. That's going to save costs as well."
Continental is also evaluating the use of Terminal Services to provide a scaled-down desktop at smaller airports. And, it is considering using Windows 2000 to host its accounting system, which is now being revamped. "We wouldn't have even considered Windows 2000 if not for its reliable performance and scalability," Craig states. "We believe that—in terms of development dollars—with Windows 2000 and Microsoft technologies, we're getting a lot more bang for our buck than with other technologies."
Software and Services
Windows® 2000 Advanced Server
Windows 2000 Server
—Transaction Service
—Terminal Services
Windows 2000 Professional
SQL ServerTM 7.0
Exchange Server 5.5
For More Information
For more information about Microsoft products or services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Resource Centre at (800) 563-9048. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary.
For more information on Continental Airlines, see the Continental Airlines Web site.
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Last Updated: Thursday, May 18, 2000
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