CASE STUDY
AVIATAR offers an open and neutral
technology platform that invites other
industry players to bring in their ideas,”
said Mohr. “Behind open source technology
there’s always a big community evolving
the product very fast compared to
proprietary technology.”
Red Hat products help AVIATAR gain the
flexibility to integrate with partners or
customers, regardless of their technology.
Using open standards and flexible solutions
– such as JBoss Fuse, 3scale API gateways
and Red Hat single sign-on (SSO) – makes
providing applications on the AVIATAR
platform easy and reliable. Customers and
partners can use and offer their preferred
solutions and tools while maintaining a
uniform user experience.
3scale API Management controls access
to the company’s APIs to support safer
integration and collaboration with external
developers. By deploying apps in containers
and using container-native solutions,
Lufthansa Technik can offer AVIATAR’s
capabilities in any environment.
“We can collaborate with third-party
developers who are very specialised in other
areas of aviation – for example, operations,
fuel efficiency, or catering,” said Hansen.
“Customers can choose between different
solutions running on AVIATAR and if they
have favourite providers, work with them to
easily integrate and run on AVIATAR.”
Anticipated financial savings
With its Red Hat infrastructure supporting
AVIATAR, Lufthansa Technik anticipates
significant reductions in MRO costs for
participating airlines – equating to millions
of euros per airline.
“With tight schedules and high passenger
expectations, the costs directly related
to delayed flights are growing quickly for
the average airline,” said Hansen. “We are
taking out a huge chunk of those costs
with AVIATAR.”
Finding new ways to innovate
Lufthansa Technik plans to continue
improving AVIATAR by automating technical
processes and expanding the solution’s
www.intelligentcio.com
AVIATAR OFFERS AN OPEN AND
NEUTRAL TECHNOLOGY PLATFORM
THAT INVITES OTHER INDUSTRY
PLAYERS TO BRING IN THEIR IDEAS.
use cases, helping airlines continue to gain
insight from digital data analysis.
“We have a large use case pipeline based
on decades of engineering experience.
We’re going to deploy lots of new
applications solving different needs on top
of AVIATAR,” said Hansen. “The list grows
longer every day, because we’re talking to
and co-creating with our customers. We’re
incorporating a lot of user feedback.”
Using its new agile, flexible, hybrid cloud
infrastructure, the company can focus on
work that supports its core goal: improving
the experience of airline passengers.
“What keeps us motivated when working
on AVIATAR is that passengers get home
on time and can spend more time with
their families,” said Hansen. “We’re really
improving the passenger experience and
that’s something to be proud of.”
Intelligent CIO Europe caught up
with Johannes Hansen, Senior Director
Application Development and User
Experience, to find out more about
the solution:
How has the company been able to
keep up with technological innovation
since the implementation?
In our space, we must constantly innovate
as there is strong competition in the
marketplace for predictive solutions
in aviation – that’s why we constantly
introduce new pieces of technology.
We encourage our autonomous teams
to adopt new technologies but have a
mechanism in place to avoid them to just
play around. We live by the mantra ‘you
build it, you run it’, which basically means
each team is responsible for operating
services that it built.
How has the automation of
the solution allowed you to work
more efficiently?
Developers are happier than ever – with
OpenShift and Ansible, they are significantly
more productive as they never have to
wait for provisioning of infrastructure. You
have to see it like is: we are coming from an
on-premise world where you have to order
servers or databases weeks in advance with
a paper form. We notice the change daily.
Teams carry out more development which is
their primary focus and spend less time with
preparation. Thus, developer productivity
increases considerably.
How important is having a flexible
solution operating within your system?
As we built a unique tailor-made predictive
maintenance solution with automation
built in, flexibility was key from the very
beginning. We didn’t want to rely on
standard software from a large vendor
as our strengths in operating aircraft and
automating the highly regulated processes
in our industry would have become
marginalised. Flexibility is still very important
to this day as we want to remain agile and
be able to react quickly to changing trends in
the market.
What benefits does the new solution
provide end-users with?
AVIATAR combines industry-leading
predictive maintenance algorithms with
capabilities to automate the processes if
a failure is predicted. Our approach gives
credit to the fact that prediction without the
corresponding fulfilment is worthless to an
operator of high-value equipment like an
airline. While doing all of that we focus a lot
on the user experience as this is classically
underserved in B2B software. n
INTELLIGENTCIO
61