The one class of passenger that Crystal Cruises doesn’t look forward to welcoming on its luxury cruise ships is its IT staff. The company’s ships are floating first-class hotels, and its goal is to provide the finest travel experience possible. In addition to the leaded crystal and bone china, that travel experience includes flawless service—backed by technology systems that keep everything humming with perfect efficiency.
Those technology systems track accounts for each guest, including charges incurred in restaurants, gift shops, spas, and other ship amenities; charge guests’ credit cards; and have statements waiting for guests when their cruises are completed. The systems also manage “behind the scenes” functions such as the crew duty rosters and payroll.
In an earlier age, shipboard technology like this might have been optional. Today, it’s a necessity. “We are a 24/7 environment, which means we don’t have weekends,” says Thilo Schmiedeknecht, Senior IT Officer on the company’s Crystal Serenity. “We never have off days. We have days where a cruise ends and new cruise starts. It’s very important that everything is constantly up and running because we cannot afford downtime, which will affect customer service.”
Downtime becomes costly in another way, as well. “Our ships are like luxury hotels with one key difference,” says Boban Dragojilovic, Vice President of Computer Services, Crystal Cruises. “When a computer system breaks down, we’re likely to be in the middle of the ocean, halfway around the world from our Los Angeles headquarters. It’s no easy feat to send a technician out to fix a problem.”
To avoid having to fly technicians out to service ships in mid-cruise, Crystal Cruises ran duplicate systems on each of its ships; if one failed, the other was pressed into service. This was an expensive solution, given that each ship ran a pair of IBM 3090 mainframes. An IBM 7060 mainframe ran backoffice functions in the company’s Los Angeles headquarters.
A financial premium for reliability wasn’t the only drawback to this system. The legacy technology on the mainframes included Customer Information Control System (CICS)/COBOL code—and a lot of it: more than two million lines of code in the headquarters system and another 500,000 lines of code in the shipboard systems. That CICS/COBOL code was difficult to integrate with contemporary systems—such as the ships’ Microsoft® SQL Server® 2005-based point-of-service system.
Beyond the challenges of integration, the aging code—Crystal Cruises had originated the software more than 15 years earlier—was difficult to maintain. New programmers weren’t being trained in the technology, making it harder to find developers to update the code. And because Crystal Cruises also maintained applications based on the Microsoft .NET Framework, it had to maintain two platforms, including dual development staffs.
The cost of software licenses and hardware maintenance for the IBM-based solution was “staggeringly high,” Dragojlovic says. And even though the solution had a high price tag, it was not as functional as Crystal Cruises wanted. “How much can you do in 80 columns and 32 rows of text in a green screen?” asks Dragojlovic rhetorically.
Dragojlovic and his colleagues knew that they needed a different solution. That decision was confirmed as software vendors began to discontinue their support for some of the VSE operating system tools on which Crystal Cruises’ code depended.
Crystal Cruises considered the option of a third-party off-the-shelf solution, but rejected it because it would not permit the company to continue to use its custom business logic. Rewriting the code for another operating system would have taken perhaps U.S.$2 million and 12 person-years—a prohibitive expense.
Then, Dragojlovic heard about NetCOBOL, NeoKicks, and NeoBatch technologies from Fujitsu, which would enable the company to port its existing applications to native Microsoft ASP.NET code to run as a Web application over a ship’s intranet. Crystal Cruises would be able to preserve its original business logic—and, thus, also to preserve its investment in that logic. The process promised to be faster and less expensive than rewriting the applications for .NET. Dragojlovic proposed porting the shipboard systems for less than $200,000 as a proof of concept for an enterprisewide migration. The company’s top executives agreed.
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That ported the code—but left Crystal Cruises with the green screens with which it had started. To show employees the benefits of the port to ASP.NET, and because the error-free conversion gave Crystal Cruises time for additional work, Dragojlovic and his colleagues decided to replace the legacy navigation system.
In place of the old system, based on the 12 function keys, they used the Microsoft development systems to create a dynamic menu control. Primary menu options appear in a frame on the left side of the browser window, with expanding and contracting menu options, and the selected destination page opens in a frame on the right side of the browser window. (See Figure 1.)
“If we had left the green screens and function-key navigation, users wouldn’t have understood why we went through the change,” says Dragojlovic. “This immediately showcased what the new system could do.”
Crystal Cruises implemented other changes as well. The reporting system was changed to produce page description file-formatted reports, which were e-mailed to users, in place of the old system, which printed hardcopies of reports. “On a ship, where storage is an issue, this was a big deal—and not something we could have easily implemented in the old system,” says Dragojlovic.
The ported solution runs on a pair of Dell 1950 computers on each ship, one computer for the active solution and one computer as a backup. To reduce licensing costs, the system—including the application, Fujitsu code, and the Windows Server® 2003 operating system—runs in a virtual machine based on Microsoft Virtual Server 2006. The virtual machine is switched between physical computers on a regular basis to ensure that both computers are working properly, and each hard drive is mirrored on the other computer as a disaster recovery measure.
| Figure 1: In place of function-key navigation (left), the .NET version of the Crystal Cruises application has an intuitive point-and-click navigation pane (right). |
Deploying the solution appeared to be a challenge, given that the ships are in operation 24 x 7. The company cut over from the mainframe to the .NET-based solution on each ship during a two-hour overnight period. Staff and guests went to sleep with the mainframe system in operation, woke up with the .NET-based system in operation, and the cruises proceeded without incident.
By porting its onboard system from the mainframe to .NET, Crystal Cruises has made its system more effective, reduced costs, and increased performance.
Easier Integration with Third-Party Solutions
In contrast to the
mainframe-based solution, which Crystal Cruises could not easily
integrate with its other systems, the ASP.NET version integrates easily
with such systems—for example, with the cruise line’s onboard phone
system.
“The third-party packages we use and want to use have integration with .NET out of the box,” says Dragojlovic. “That means we can integrate them with our ported solution without the need for custom connections, saving us thousands of dollars on each connection.”
Replacing the IBM 3090 mainframes with newer versions would have been prohibitively expensive, says Dragojlovic. Replacing them with Windows®-based hardware is being accomplished for about 20 percent as much.
And the lower hardware price is only part of the savings that Crystal Cruises is seeing from the new solution. Software licensing is inherently lower and is reduced further by the use of Virtual Server to eliminate the need for application licenses on each machine onboard ship. Maintenance of the Windows-based systems is also more cost effective, saving Crystal Cruises about 60 percent of its previous maintenance costs. Easier user navigation with the new interface also reduces training costs.
“We’re seeing a tremendous reduction in total cost of ownership by porting from the mainframe to .NET,” says Dragojlovic. “That means more than saving money—it means we can direct our investment to areas where it has the greatest impact on guest services. Fujitsu and Microsoft are enabling us to do an even better job at what we do best.”
The new solution also provides levels of flexibility and functionality that Crystal Cruises did not see with the mainframe. Beyond the highly visual navigation system, the company is also presenting information—such as breakdowns on passenger totals by demographic or other categories—to staff in more graphical ways, making that information faster to understand and easier to use.
“The graphs we’re providing to staff through the .NET solution were impossible to create on the mainframe,” says Dragojlovic. “Now, our employees have an important new tool that gives them information and insight to do their jobs.”
The graphical interface is helpful in other ways, as well. Dragojlovic points to the limitations of the 32-line green screen, which required users to flip pages constantly as they moved through large amounts of data. With the .NET solution, they can scroll through that information more quickly. The use of drop-down lists also eliminates the need to memorize obscure codes, such as codes for guests’ ports of origin.
It’s not only shipboard employees who enjoy the greater flexibility of the .NET-based solution—executives at the company’s corporate offices take advantage of the .NET flexibility, too.
“With the new .NET code, it is much easier for our head office to implement changes, to change parts of the system, to integrate other systems into our main data,” says Schmiedeknecht, the Crystal Serenity’s Senior IT Officer.
One of the unexpected benefits of the move from the mainframe to .NET was the increase in performance, according to Dragojlovic. “Our people were absolutely blown away by the increase in performance that we see with .NET compared to the mainframe,” he says.
For example, the final checkout process for guests at the end of a cruise used to take an hour to run; now it’s completed in 90 seconds. The faster speed possible with .NET has led to enhanced business processes. Backups, for example, are so much faster that they’re implemented several times a day, instead of just once a day, as before.
Also, the company used to close the accounts of departing guests and add accounts for new guests at every port stop. In the process of adding and deleting guest accounts, errors could be made. Now, Crystal Cruises eliminates that possibility by completely resetting the entire guest roster at each port—in less time than it used to take just to implement changes.
All of this improvement enables Crystal Cruises to provide better service to its guests. “It’s important that we have a lot of data available quickly and that all the people who have contact with the guest have the information they need,” says Schmiedeknecht. “That can range from what kind of pillow a guest prefers to what kind of beverage he or she prefers. Now, this data is faster and easier to access, so we can concentrate on customer service.”
Any major system migration can entail risk for an organization. One of the benefits that Dragojlovic sees from the use of Fujitsu NeoKicks, NetCOBOL, and NeoBatch is that they mitigate much of that risk by allowing Crystal Cruises to migrate in increments, when and as it is ready, rather than having to migrate all at once. For example, the company initiated its migration by porting its onboard application code to .NET, but not its VSAM-based data files. Those data files will be migrated to the Microsoft SQL Server data management system in a followup phase of the project.
“It’s extremely appealing that I don’t have to do the entire migration, take on the entire risk, and incur the entire cost, at once,” says Dragojlovic. “By reducing the risk of migration, this becomes a perfect solution for anyone on a mainframe who wants to reduce costs while increasing functionality and performance.”
Microsoft .NET
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