Planning flight operations is a complex and time-critical task, made even more challenging during the coronavirus pandemic. Eurowings, a specialist low-cost European airline and part of the Lufthansa Group, has had to adapt to ensure both its operations and staff stay safe.
Eurowings faced several challenges when looking for ways to ensure secure remote access to key applications. One potential issue was low bandwidth, which could pose problems when users need to run multiple application sessions at once.
NetLine, one key application developed by Lufthansa Systems—the airline group’s IT provider—runs on several Unix servers at the company’s data center. It is a highly graphical and essential tool for the 300-strong team that plans operations to ensure everything runs smoothly and efficiently.
Eurowings had already embarked on a program to replace its existing remote access solution. That system had a number of issues, including poor administration and security. It also restricted the number of sessions that users could have open. Together, these issues were impacting productivity, efficiency and the ability to react to live situations, such as last-minute crew or aircraft changes. So when the pandemic struck and staff had to switch to home working using a variety of computing platforms, some with poor bandwidth, Eurowings needed to accelerate its switch to a new solution.
“Our colleagues at Lufthansa Systems recommended OpenText Exceed TurboX, as they were already using it successfully to provide secure remote access for their users,” said Andreas Buxot, Expert Flight Operation Applications at Eurowings. “During the PoC [proof of concept], we were impressed with the high-quality administration functionality, which we could see would address issues we were experiencing. Added to this, the security is far superior [to what] we had at the time, and support for a much higher number of connections per user would alleviate the need for users to keep switching and closing sessions and applications.”
With global travel restrictions under constant review, it’s more important than ever to be able to quickly and efficiently react to changes. OpenText™ Exceed™ TurboX is now in use by an ever-growing number of Eurowings employees who benefit from its ease of use, flexibility, security and performance improvements. And that, in turn, benefits Eurowings’ customers.
