Page III: In an exclusive interview, the CTO of the UK travel portal says the open-source community provides better support than vendors such as IBM or BEA.
There were some technology partner announcements between Lastminute and Microsoft last year around .Net. How much of the site is actually engineered around .Net?
We primarily stayed with open-source technology. Almost everything we do is in Java. So it's all J2EE. Almost all the operating systems are Linux, we do have some Solaris on our databases and we use open-source middleware, which is Jboss. Almost all our development tools are from the open-source community. The guys love to deal with open source and get involved in the community. If we want to make changes to Jboss -- we usually get the changes overnight. Try doing that with Weblogic or Websphere or whatever. The trade-off is that you need guys with a lot of expertise. But since what we have to do the rest of the time is very high-tech then we have to have those guys anyway. So it's no additional investment to us but to people who aren't building a big e-commerce platform it's an extra cost.
Have you ever considered Linux desktop internally?
Sure. Some of the guys have. But we have so many connections to suppliers plus we're a big email user and getting full email connectivity would be difficult at this stage. We email all the time -- we send email confirmations of electronic tickets, so all that has to work well, that would be my own worry about converting from Windows to a Linux desktop. It would mean having things like Ximian working seamlessly without us having to go through too many integration issues. It is almost there and some people are doing it but I think they are mostly internal projects that they have a compelling reason for. We might be able to save some money over time but I think it's something to look at on the horizon.
With a lot of these relationships Lastminute has with like Trainline, Tesco.com, Iberia.com -- is a lot of your time spent with integration issues?
Well, yeah, 20 percent. Integration is at multiple levels though: there's connectivity, we might get a data feed from somebody else or we're feeding them. In Trainline's case we give them our inventory too. It's a two-way Web-services or XML feed but the data's different so you have to normalise all that. We have very sophisticated communication architecture. Probably more sophisticated than any other travel company, which is an advantage because once you've figured out how to do it, you can connect new people more easily.
Do most of your partners have the Web-services or XML expertise to contribute to the relationship?
I think in about 80 percent of cases they will have in-house expertise but in 20 percent of cases we will help them or accommodate whatever they have.
Do you feel that Lastminute is a software or services provider now as much as a travel portal?
Oh definitely. With the hook up with the Trainline, we wrote an XML specification that was a 100-page document of schemas, back-up and recovery, etc. They started writing to the specifications so it's exactly like you're a software provider. And a lot of the guys I have hired have worked in software companies and have built real products.
Google has done a lot to foster its reputation as a technical innovator. Do you think Lastminute would benefit from following suit?
I think Google is a good example. I know a lot about search -- I ran the Infoseek search engine at Disney. Let's say you do a Google search, what have they got? They have got a bunch of spiders that go out there and bring everything back. They have got a great big bank of 20,000 PCs all chained together that do searches in parallel, bring your index back in the right order and you pick one.
Now consider us doing a hotel search. The first thing that comes up is that you might do a geo-spatial search; you might want to stay 30km from the Eiffel Tower. So we actually have a map that comes up. It has coordinates with little pictures of the hotel on it, you can click on it. That goes to a latitude/longitude database, which gives a correlation to a city and a country. Then you find your hotel; there are around 50,000 properties that explode out in 60GB of data. That hotel chain then explodes out into all sorts of room types. Then the search degenerates into a temporal search through time because that room price is only available for a certain period. It's almost like a tick-by-tick database almost like they have in stock and bond trading applications. Now we are doing that in real-time and we are giving you instantaneous results.
Now technologically, I think that is ten times more difficult than search - not one of scale but pure computer science. On our search team we have three guys who have PhD's in neural nets who are really attracted here because of the computer-science problems.
Have you hired a lot of new staff since you arrived?
Yep. Most of the recruiting has been permanent staff out of the UK [and] a few guys from the US that maybe had special skills. But I would say you could find everything you need in the UK pretty much. We are also going to do some university recruiting this year out of Imperial and the five or six best schools.
14%
7%
