Lufthansa Systems

Recently, the organization needed to replace its client access system for the roughly 4,000 users at 110 airlines who need to securely and reliably access the Lido applications. “We required the system to function securely and correctly from a technical point of view,” said Christian Baumbach, Senior Project Manager at Lufthansa Systems. “The focus was on operational stability—it had to work with minimal downtime. We also needed the migration from the old system to be seamless, so that it would not impact users.”

Lufthansa Systems selected OpenText™ Exceed™ TurboX, a webbased, remote access software for UNIX®, Linux® and Windows® desktops and applications. The solution provides a central location for IT organizations to securely deploy applications running on a variety of server platforms. Exceed TurboX is now being used internally at Lufthansa Systems for employee access to different applications, as well as providing web-based access for customers to log in to the Lido solution portfolio, running both on-premises and in the cloud. Baumbach commented on the deployment: “For our customers, the OpenText Exceed TurboX implementation was seamless. For them, it was not a big change—it is just in the background. And that was our main goal.”

Exceed TurboX has delivered important benefits behind the scenes at Lufthansa Systems, including robust security, solution stability and valuable administrative abilities. For example, the solution’s session sharing feature allows the Lufthansa Systems help desk to directly interact with customer systems to quickly resolve any technical issues. “We have a 24/7 technical help desk. With OpenText Exceed TurboX, we can look into the system, share screens, as well as take over sessions to troubleshoot critical issues. We can better support our customers using session sharing than we can by dealing with the problem over telephone or email. Any customer issues can quickly lead to costly flight delays. It is helping us when we are helping our customers,” explained Baumbach. In addition, Exceed TurboX provides strong security on several levels to protect the system from internal and external attacks. Keeping core applications in a central data center ensures there is no unauthorized access and strong encryption is used for the data traffic between the client browser and the Exceed TurboX web server, as well as for the screen content stream between a node and the client. Baumbach confirmed the importance of security. “Security is a big factor here. Our networks to our customers are secured, but the application itself needs to be secure as well. External intrusion is a real concern. More and more airlines are keen to close the doors against external, non-authorized people accessing the environment.”

Stability and resiliency are also critical elements to Lufthansa’s remote access solution. Exceed TurboX can be configured as a highly available solution, with all critical server components providing failover capabilities. Lufthansa Systems deployed Exceed TurboX to three global data centers, in Frankfurt, London and Dallas, to ensure high performance for users anywhere in the world and provide high availability in case of a failure in one data center. This architecture ensures customer cloud access to Lido is always available. Moreover, the Exceed TurboX core engine is extremely stable. “There are no issues and no complaints. The operations capability is key in any component, from infrastructure layout to the front-end user experience. It is of utmost importance for us to have a totally stable environment without downtime. And this has been fully achieved,” said Baumbach.

Additionally, the team at Lufthansa Systems counts the collaborative OpenText relationship as an important benefit over its previous solution. In the past, the company had no input or influence on product features and development. Olivier Stolz, Senior Director of Operations and Services at Lufthansa Systems, recalled the challenges. “We have more than 100 airlines using Lido flight solutions, and our application is vital to keeping airlines operational. However, we had no control over the previous solution at all. We were just a small customer from their perspective.” “Our relationship is totally different with OpenText. We have good cooperation, and OpenText is more than willing to support us in our business. That is very important to us. As the sponsor of this project, I never heard any complaints about the service from OpenText. In fact, the opposite was the case. If ever there were an issue, it was reported back to me that the OpenText support was excellent.”