Network Computing in the Travel Industry

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Network computing in the travel industry Keith Gaylord, Product Marketing Executive, IBM Corporation

Keith is a long time IBM individual, he's been there 20 years, he's done his time insales and marketing he's also quartered a publication on strategic alliances with aRobert Porter-Lynch, Warn Corporation, interesting thing Keith was telling me, hestarted in the network computing division when they had 6 people, which I guess theyhave a couple more than that now, thank you Keith let's go with it.Thank you very much.Thank you ladies and gentlemen, it's very daunting to be in a group of people whohave such an in-depth knowledge of an industry so I'm going to claim right now andlet you know up front that I don't hail from the travel industry, my role within thenetwork computing computer group within IBM is to help our industry groupsintegrate technology into their solutions. So there may be some names like BrianHamel or Patty Jones that may be familiar to some of you. I do collaborate with themalong with our other product groups to deliver solutions to our customers and in turnwho will deliver them to theirs. What's a little bit different about this is it does havesomewhat of a product category focus, one of the things I hope to accomplish thisafternoon is to raise the level of awareness of something that is in fact very new tothe information industry. There has been problems in the past in the last 2 and

a half years when there were six and there are now hundreds if not thousands of peoplededicated to various elements of network computing solutions for industry, but thereis still a tremendous amount of confusion of exactly what a network computer is andis not, so I will try to help establish that. And more importantly to help raise the levelof awareness about where network computing solutions are able to positively impactboth our customers and your customers in turn. One of the things I'd like to do aspart of this is a little show and tell, to pass round the first network computer this isnot the first one off the line that IBM put out, but this is what is referred to as a series100, it's small but referred to the size of an algebra book, it's a couple of poundsmaximum, it's very energy efficient, it draws about 7 or 8 watts night light, somepeople say why do I turn it off at night and that's a good question, a lot people decideto leave it on. It does have moving parts, it's got an on/off switch right here, and it'sgot a diaphragm in its speaker so that's the extent of what could possibly go wrongfrom a moving point of view. It's got a little window in it, this particular model's got apower PC chip, we're moving to Intel technologies and future iterations of networkstations. Forty three years meantime to failure on these, hopefully, there are few thatcome out DOA. But take it, look at it, pass it around, there's a parallel serial port,there's a Ethernet attachment, PCMCIA card attachment for keyboard and for mouse.Now there's a tremendous amount of information as we all have information on our products and services, but in the CD there is this website and it's a portal so to speakinto other sources of information about network computing and if in the event you'dlike to communicate with me that's my address if you'd like to do so. This is intendedto be somewhat of a stage setter, everybody has got things that presumably keepthem up at night they don't call at work for nothing, and what I'm suggesting is thatthis era of network computing, or IBM refers to it as E-business, is something that'sable to solve real problems. Now IBM, especially the travel industry has got a host of offerings, I don't intend to cover each one of these, but as I look at them and as Irelate experiences I've had with customers or shared customers there are a number of these offerings which in fact have a very very high impact. One that I'm personallyinvolved in to a large extent is the advanced communications systems access,ACSA, but again more information is available, you have a brochure that was handedout to you, it's got URL's in that as well. This is a simplified view and often timeswhen I talk to customers I talk to partners or other technology integrators, often times

will just look at this and begin to envision what is that we're really talking about butthe simplified view of this is we are not in the terms of some who'd like to think goingback to the non-programmable terminal days but in fact we're able to provide thesame level function, the same level or greater of service level at less cost than thealternative that was available say three years ago. We started out in the early 80swith PCs and we've grown with PCs and we've evolved to a point where in manycases each one of the desktops that are deployed today have the same images of allthe applications of the corporate organisation whether it gets used or not, has somedata on it and has a variety of support capabilities that require things like movingparts, a disk. But this is a simplified view, what were talking about with networkcomputing is shifting the support of function and data off the desktop and into aserver environment. Gartner Group has been maintaining information on cost of ownership, they tell us, since about the mid-1980s, it didn't really come out, so tospeak, until 1996 or so, when the topic of total cost of ownership became extremelyvogue and now they have a server dedicated to analysing and assessing cost of ownership to customers, they've acquired perhaps one of the strongest players in themarket interpose which is the core of their services technology. And if you look downhere the date on this is really February 1996 and some people will say, well where'sthe new information, we ought to be 1998 anyway. The fact of the matter is this datahasn't fundamentally changed as a matter of fact what we have learned is instead of costing in the range of £8,000 to £15,000 a year per desktop, land attached desktop,that actually is going up as we see the complexity of the desktop and the amount of data and applications that are being asked to reside on every desktop out there.Now important in this conversation is the notion that the preponderance of the cost of support on an annual basis is not the acquisition cost, it's not the capital or a lot of companies are moving toward expense to support their desktop because they can'twrite them off legitimately over the period of time that you're supposed to, so they'removing PC acquisitions to expense, but the largest cost associated with the user operations and the administration to support the desktop. Much of which is involvedin routine activities which include introducing new applications, updates to oldapplications, or as well experience, and I've been experiencing that with my laptopit's been into Memphis twice in the last two months, like physical hardware problems.And that's where the majority of the cost resides, what remains consistent whenyou're in a network attached world, and a desktop world is that the application andthe application support remains the same. That means those that need helpunderstanding how to use the software, the applications, how to migrate from one toanother and so forth, things that are inherent in the nature of the function will remainthe same. The variances are in the operations and administrative support primarily.Now early on there was a great deal of over-zealousness on the part of Mr Ellison inparticular but Scott McNeilly in the 1996 era were really touting the potential of network computers and network computing and if you think about their businessmodels they had a very strong vested interest in doing so. In reality they got a littlebit carried away, and this is not a pejorative statement at all it's just something theyhad decided to do, Sung came out with a Java station and it was intended to be aJava station, meaning you ran only Java applications, there was no capability at thetime for other emulators, there was no access to Windows applications and it didn'tsucceed and does anybody have any Java stations today? I'm looking for hands,good intentions we very much want from an IBM point of view for other players likeOracle, like Sung, like Wise, like NCDI and others to in fact make a presence in thismarket place, because what we're doing here hasn't been done and I'm saying thisfrom an industry perspective since the early 1980s. And that's introducing a newproduct category, it's not a PC, it's not like anything we've had before. Now the valueproposition here is from a user point of view to deliver the same or more function, or more access to information applications to deliver this equal or greater function, atequal or greater service levels at less cost than the alternatives. That's the value

proposition, I submit it, it's our value proposition as a product in services and designintegrator, I submit it to you for your customer if you want to deliver the same thing,whether it's internal to the organisation or out to your affiliated enterprises or customers. So what we're doing is merging in reality the best of both worlds andhopefully minimising or altogether obviating the negative aspects of the twoenvironments. Non-programmable on one hand and a personal computer, landattached desktop on the other. Getting back to the statement that what we're doingis going back to the old days of dumb terminals attached to 370 390 Unix servers, for example, a network computer, that's being passed around right now has on it when itis operable, a browser, a at least one Java virtual machine, it's got natively 3270emulation 5250X, and you can add on VT and others. So a non-programmableterminal doesn’t have that capability, non-programmable terminals don't havegraphical interfaces network computers generically by definition have graphical user interfaces. So there is a real distinction between non-programmables and the worldof network attached computers. What a network computer doesn’t have is, I alwaysthink of this as moving parts, and moving parts inherently have things that go wrongwith them, whether they be disk drives in particular, and copies of operating systemson them. So it's bring together the best of both worlds. This is pretty much what Idescribed earlier, what I would change on this is the idea that Windows applicationsreally fall outside the larger realm in here, the way I view Windows applications and Igo back to the model of the Java station is they didn't take into consideration that95% of PCs today access Windows applications in one form or another. So weperceive as requirement that you need to be able to get to any server in the networkand now I talk about Windows applications running under NT in the terminal server edition, an Ica from Cytrex is just another server out in the network. This is anattempt to say that we're moving into a new world it's a different picture of what I hadbefore, and in this one it really includes that NT windows, as another server on thenetwork, again I mentioned that I've been working quite a bit in the airline industrywe're partnered, we're working in collaboration with CIDA and CIDA has announcedsomething that is called the 'The Network Computer Solution and E-migrationRoadmap'. Just out of curiosity has anyone had any exposure to CIDAs newinitiative at the desktop. That's good feedback for them. But in any case we areworking with them, and one of the things that we have been demonstrating is theability of a network computer sitting in Bedfont Lakes in the UK accessing a TPF hostin Florida, running Windows application from out of Hersley and accessing Unixapplications and Domino applications out of Wilton, Connecticut. Now that kind of demonstration really highlights the idea akin to the analogue that I like to use which isa cellphone, how many people have cellphones, everybody. I don't have a cellphoneby the way, but what do you want delivered in self-service, you want to be able topick it up and get a dial tone every time you turn it on, right. And you want to be ableto call any number as long as it's a legitimate number wherever it is in the world atany time during the day. Do you have any idea where the switches are that routethose calls? Do you have any idea what the processor is that's inside your cellphone? Do you care? You want function, you want performance and you wantlow cost. That in a nut shell is what network computing is all about. You as a user don't care where those servers reside, as long as you can get to them, and they're upthey're in the hours that you work and they're low cost and that's really the model thatwe're striving for as an industry. This is in one way to say that IBM has been in theleadership position, it's also to talk about the fact that there are other players in themarket place and I mentioned earlier before, this is a new product category it'sabsolutely critical from an industry perspective in my estimation that every one of those players is successful. On the right hand side, the pundits out there who have atendency to watch us are trying to forecast what they think the volume future is of network computers. Now Misha from Marriott and I had a little conversation aboutadoption rates, the adoption of the network computer as a product category has

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