Deckchair Case Study

Company: IBM, Travel and TransportationCustomer: Deckchair.comSubmitted by: BSMG WorldwideEverything about a holiday should be relaxing – including the booking process – according to rockstar turned entrepreneur Bob Geldof. So when it came to re-launching his online travel agency deckchair.com he wanted a solution that would make light work of sorting through the site’s unrivalled spread of both chartered and scheduled flights.Impatient by nature, Bob Geldof refuses to put up with Web sites that fail to respond quickly or are unable to deliver the right information. So when his technical team reported the excellent performance achieved while trialing an evaluation copy of IBM’s DB2 Universal Database for Linux, his interest was aroused immediately.

Spectacular results

Further tests confirmed his team’s initial reaction and in May this year deckchair.com became the first e-commerce Web site to be powered by IBM’s DB2 for Linux running on IBM Netfinity servers.The results have been spectacular. In tandem with deckchair.com’s own advanced search engine, the IBM solution has brought the potential booking time on the site down to just three minutes – a pace that satisfies even the fast-moving and fast-thinking Bob Geldof.Of equal significance in selecting the platform for deckchair.com’s ground-breaking relaunch was the portability offered by a Linux-based solution.

As deckchair.com co-founder James Page explained: “Because Linux is an open source software solution, it has enabled deckchair.com to run on any hardware configuration. This allows the company the opportunity to look for a combination of best price/performance, hardware and software.”