Open Source for OLTP

Travel portal Yatra is using Red Hat Enterprise Linux to deliver products and services faster says Mohd Shariff PA

The Internet has opened up new avenues for companies to sell traditional products and services and consequently the e-commerce market for jobs, travel, entertainment and matrimonials has taken off in a big way. In the last two years, the online travel portal segment has seen many players launch a site. Yatra Online Pvt. Ltd. with 220 employees, kickstarted its operations in 2007. With the goal of being a comprehensive travel portal, it aims to offer a better customer experience through operational excellence as well as customized products and services.

Yatra has been able to offer packaged deals and customized offerings to different segments of customers after it deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Manish Amin, Co-Founder, Yatra, said, “We have achieved near 100% uptime for our call center operations.” Yatra helps businesses and consumers book airline, railway and bus tickets and reserve hotel rooms and car rentals by calling its call center, or by going on the Web site.

It provides travel-related information, pricing, availability and reservations for airlines, hotels, railway, buses and car rentals across 5,000 large cities and rural areas throughout India. Its multi-language customer service center enables business and family or leisure travelers to make well-informed and cost-effective bookings 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, through its online, call center and mobile support. The company also offers free travel-related news and travel advisory services. Yatra’s investors include Norwest Venture Partners (NVP), a leading venture capital firm, Reliance Capital (a member of Reliance Group headed by Anil Ambani), and Television 18 Group. The company has developed cutting-edge, proprietary travel technology and established close partnerships with travel suppliers in India.

Business challenges

Amin said, “Being in the travel industry we needed a secure, reliable and cost-effective platform to run mission-critical applications and secure OLTP transactions. We wanted to enhance the customer experience at all points of contact.” Yatra picked Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) on HP blade servers to form the bedrock of its IT infrastructure. Through this implementation the company has benefited in many ways—better tracking of customer traffic and enhanced customer experience. Beyond this it’s customers benefited from first priority bookings and customized travel packages and deals and better and quicker development of customized travel applications.

Amin explains, “The establishment of Yatra in 2007 could not have been more timely. More people are traveling everyday for business and leisure. Holidaying is an integral part of the lives of many Indians and the biggest beneficiary has been the travel industry.” The premise was to replicate the success that online travel has had in the US and Europe in an emerging and fast growing market such as India. The Indian market was also moving from an information-centric to a transaction-driven market for online products and services.

The challenges faced by a one-stop portal such as Yatra were always going to be huge. For airline tickets, it had to configure fares and availability options of all domestic carriers apart from making bus and railway tickets available to businesses and consumers. However, the delivery system and a secure, reliable transaction mechanism had to be in place to attract and retain customers.

Innovate or perish

Amin said, “Over the past couple of years, online travel has benefited from a number of offline industry-led activities. The emergence of low-cost air carriers has fueled the cause of domestic air travel. The easy and hassle-free availability of tickets through the Indian Railways Web site has boosted the prospects for the nascent but high-potential e-commerce industry.”

Yatra has struck up a number of partnerships and alliances with leading travel suppliers and allied vendors. The back-end processes had to be functioning smoothly to ensure the seamless availability of its services to customers. Today, Yatra has interfaces with all the major airlines. Since it had hedged its bets on the ‘package deal’ differentiator, it tied up with 1,300 hotels across 170 Indian cities. This enabled Yatra to ‘sweeten’ the deal for online purchasers who look for hotel accommodations and reservations along with air tickets. For transactions too, Yatra chose to look beyond the credit card option and accepts payments through direct bank credits, ITZ cash card and Cash-On-Delivery. The intent has been to enhance the customer experience on the Yatra Web site, which is the main booking engine and had to run uninterrupted without any downtime or business disruption.

A robust platform

To enable the availability of this panoply of services and that too on a 24/7 basis (on an average, Yatra makes 60-70 transactions at night) called for a reliable, robust and secure platform for business transactions. The top management did not want to experiment much and needed a low-cost, high-throughput, secure and reliable platform. Amin said, “We did not want to waste time learning new things. The IT team in place was already conversant with the force-multiplier options of Open Source and the advantages that this technology provided for developing Yatra’s applications and so the tilt towards Red Hat became that much easier. Additionally, we had constraints of time and had to get the site and call center up and running after we announced the launch date of the portal in January 2007.”

The key intention was to drive organizational change right from the beginning while delivering what it had promised to customers at all times. One of the critical aspects that the company was firm about was having its own application development team in place rather than buy from a third-party and then customize as per requirements. It chose RHEL as its server operating system for the reliability, scalability and peace of mind it gives in running mission critical applications.

At Yatra, RHEL runs on HP Blade servers. The company has Microsoft SQL Server as its database and OpenOffice as the office productivity tool.

Supporting growth with stability

Being a start-up and a firm proponent of open source technology, it has been quite easy for Yatra to avail of benefits at an early stage of its business growth. Amin said, “Red Hat has taken us on the road to success and has been instrumental in our posting of heady growth figures in such a short span of time. RHEL is now the least of our worries. The query handling facility can be handled seamlessly due to the robustness of the OS.” The platform is scalable and robust enough to handle future requirements including traffic uptake, number of transactions and can support the roll out of additional services. Overall, the support has been great from RHEL for Yatra. He added “Red Hat Enterprises Linux is as stable as Unix and hence we are not worried overmuch about its scalability.”

Meanwhile it has also become easy for Yatra to make the site more comprehensive in terms of information, add city guides, allied information and thereby make purchase decisions easier for customers. Yatra has added more modules to its site and thereby broadened the base of customers to include SMEs. Its tie-up with Reliance Web World is expected to open up a new channel for customer touchpoints. Its customers already benefit from the first priority booking and customized travel packages and deals for multiple large to small hotels, airlines, railways, buses and car rentals at the lowest prices, as a result of strategic relationships with the leading travel suppliers.

Currently, 40,000 unique visitors log onto Yatra daily. About 2,500 tickets are traded daily. Amin added, “After opting for Red Hat Enterprise Linux, one of the biggest advantages that we have gained is adaptability to change. This, he avers, is important for a startup and has made it possible to develop products and services faster in order to address the needs of a burgeoning market place.”

mohammed.shariff@expressindia.com