Cathay Pacific Airways is a leading international airline that offers scheduled passenger and cargo services to 80 destinations worldwide. The airline employs more than 14,000 people and operates 82 aircraft. With an average aircraft age of just seven years, Cathay Pacific has one of the youngest and most technically advanced fleets in the skies.

Cathay Pacific is renowned for its award winning “Service Straight From The Heart” both on the ground and in the air. Appreciative passengers in a global poll have voted Cathay Pacific “Airline of the Year”. As the airline of Hong Kong, Cathay Pacific is committed to enhancing Hong Kong as a leading global aviation and logistics hub.

The Challenge: Deliver Applications Globally over Low-bandwidth Networks

Cathay Pacific’s corporate IT direction is to deliver all of its applications over the browser to provide easy access and cut deployment time. To facilitate the cutting of time and costs, Cathay Pacific’s IT department is taking a “no new code” approach to new applications.  

One of Cathay Pacific’s most critical applications is Ultramain, an integrated logistics and engineering maintenance system. This thick-client application keeps track of the maintenance requirements of the company’s fleet of aircraft, wherever they are in the world, and is used at 40 outports as well as headquarters for a total of 800 client PCs..

“Many of our outports around the world have only low-bandwidth connections to headquarters, and Ultramain has no Web interface,” explained C.C. Ha, Cathay Pacific’s IT Architecture Consultant.  “We needed an efficient way to Web-enable Ultramain for these constraints.”

The company also needed a way to easily provide access to business-critical applications and upgrades from new clients without sending out an IT staff member or requiring a high-bandwidth connection to upload to the client.

Implementing a Citrix Solution for Application Deployment

Ultimately, Cathay Pacific chose to implement Citrix® MetaFrame® Presentation Server software on 15 servers in its home city of Hong Kong, with 350 concurrent user licenses around the world in order to support those 800 client PCs. Now, users access Ultramain efficiently from anywhere in Cathay Pacific’s network.

Saving Substantial Man-Hours per Install with a Low-bandwidth Solution

To make its key application Ultramain accessible over the browser would have incurred prohibitive costs for rewriting of code. Instead, Cathay Pacific rolled out its implementation of Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server cost-effectively.

“Citrix software is virtually the most suitable solution in the market whereby we can Web-enable any application at the lowest possible cost and the quickest implementation timeframe,” said C.C. Ha.

As well as providing a fast implementation, Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Servers have cut the bandwidth needs of remote outports.  Since the client outport and the server only transmit mouse clicks and screen updates across the network, remote users can work efficiently with bandwidth as low as 10 to 20 kbps.

“We’re able to avoid costs in many areas with our MetaFrame Presentation Server implementation. Upgrading bandwidth would have been expensive, and sending IT staff out to install and upgrade the application locally is also time-consuming and expensive,” said C.C. Ha. Rather than installing the Ultramain client on each of 800 PCs separately, now only one installation needs to be done at the server, saving significant costs and manpower.

“Productivity is greatly enhanced with Citrix MetaFrame Presentation Server, because IT staff are spending less time installing and answering support calls, and more time on core system maintenance and high-level planning,” said C.C. Ha.

Future Plans

To further support Cathay Pacific’s IT mission to have all applications accessible over a Web browser, the company will turn to Citrix to centralize deployment and publishing of any new applications over the Web.

© 2003 Citrix Systems, Inc. All rights reserved. Citrix®, MetaFrame®, MetaFrame XP™ and Citrix Solutions Network™ are registered trademarks or trademarks of Citrix Systems, Inc. in the United States and other countries. Microsoft®, Windows® and Windows NT® are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. UNIX® is a registered trademark of The Open Group in the United States and other countries. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.