OpenJaw announces new customers, new platforms and new partnerships
MADRID, October 17 2018 – OpenJaw revealed a slew of new customers, platforms, product and partnership initiatives at its annual Global Travel Summit.
New Customers
OpenJaw announced two new Chinese customers, Chengdu Airlines and Tibet Airlines, as well as strong momentum in 2018 in China with two Chinese airline customers going live this year – Hong Kong Airlines and China United Airlines.
Kieron Branagan, CEO, OpenJaw Technologies, said of the new customer wins: ‘The OpenJaw t-Retail platform is gaining significant traction in the world’s fastest growing and largest travel market – China. Signing two new Chinese airlines in succession and delivering two live customers in 2018 (Hong Kong Airlines and China United Airlines) demonstrates why OpenJaw is among the fastest growing travel technology vendors in the world. We now have eight carriers using t-Retail in China and are poised to add more airlines to our portfolio.’
New platforms now generally available
Announcing the OpenJaw t-Data Platform – now generally available
The OpenJaw t-Data Platform is now generally available after a number of months in public beta. t-Data delivers end-to-end personalised retailing, on demand and in the cloud, and empowers travel retailers to successfully retail, distribute and fulfill across all customer touchpoints.
‘Big Data’ has disrupted travel retailing. In the past travel retailers could only segment customer by basic information such as date of travel and passenger mix. Today, travel retailers collect information from multiple sources on their customers. Crunching this vast amount of data in an economic and scalable way enables travel retailers to not just segment customers better, but also to provide a personalised experience to each customer.
‘Personalisation is now seen as essential to the success of eCommerce businesses. Customers expect brands to identify their preferences and build a tailored shopping experience around them,’ said Dr John Carney, Chief Data Scientist at OpenJaw Technologies. ‘Yet travel retailers often lack the infrastructure and data science skills necessary to deliver effective personalised content throughout the customer journey. With the OpenJaw t-Data Platform, we have solved the most difficult and complex piece of the personalisation puzzle for travel retailers. Today, we can help travel retailers create individualised experiences on demand for their customers wherever and whenever they engage.’
Announcing the OpenJaw t-Social Platform – now generally available
The OpenJaw t-Social Platform is now generally available. t-Social automates customer engagement, captures additional revenue and reduces costs for travel retailers – using the power of Artificial Intelligence. The platform fuses social messaging platforms (Facebook Messenger, WeChat, WhatsApp) together with cognitive computing platforms (such as IBM Watson) to deliver customer servicing and selling at scale through automation. Messaging platforms such as Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp are generating 100+ billion messages a day and WeChat in China is generating 230+ billion messages per day. WeChat, in particular, has become the de facto communication capability and ‘operating system’ for China.
‘The sheer number of messages being generated every day and the convenience for customers to remain within their social media platforms makes a compelling business case for using the t-Social Platform’, said Brian Lewis, Chief Technology Officer, OpenJaw Technologies. ‘Creating real conversations and human interactions for customers powered by Artificial Intelligence using social messaging platforms enables true customer centricity and enhances cost efficiencies for any travel retailer.’
Announcing OpenJaw AWS Management – now generally available
OpenJaw Technologies today announced that it is offering a Platform-as-a-Service model for its clients called AWS Management. OpenJaw will provide a cloud-based infrastructure leveraging AWS for travel retailers to design, create and run applications in the cloud. Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a broad set of global compute, storage, database, analytics, application, and deployment services that help organisations move faster, lower IT costs, and scale applications.
With AWS Management, customers can now rely on OpenJaw to develop, run, and manage OpenJaw platforms such as t-Retail, t-Social and t-Data, without the complexity of building and maintaining the infrastructure typically associated with such applications.
‘OpenJaw has been working closely with Amazon Web Services over the last 18 months, and we are impressed with its incredible scalability, security, performance, and reliability’, said Brian Lewis, Chief Technology Officer, OpenJaw Technologies. ‘Creating an AWS Management solution for our customers not only leverages the power of AWS, but also means that customers can leverage the experience and expertise of OpenJaw to deploy and manage mission-critical travel retailing applications in the cloud. Our AWS Management solution is a game changer for travel retailers.’
OpenJaw has licensed OpenSearch Fare Shopping Engine from TravelSky
OpenJaw has partnered with TravelSky to launch OpenJaw OpenSearch, a search and shopping engine with functionality that includes calendar and flexible search, fare pricing, availability, taxes, surcharges and schedule capabilities. OpenJaw has licensed OpenSearch from TravelSky for use in the international market. OpenSearch is a modern ultra-high performance fare shopping engine that has been extensively deployed within major airlines and OTAs in the Chinese travel market, for example, China Southern, China Eastern and Hong Kong Airlines.
‘OpenSearch is an impressive addition to the range of fare shopping engines that the t-Retail Platform already supports. With this licensing deal, OpenJaw is delighted to bring more choices to airlines, loyalty programmes and OTAs seeking an industry leading price/performance ratio for fare shopping.’ said Bryan Porter, Chief Commercial Officer, OpenJaw Technologies. ‘OpenSearch provides substantial economic benefits and is particularly applicable to high-volume search environments with high look-to-book ratios, for example, metasearch and NDC environments. With OpenSearch, OpenJaw solidifies its position as the most fully featured travel retailing solution available.’
New NDC Initiatives – NDC Centre of Excellence
The travel distribution landscape is changing and the ecosystem has become much more complex and disruptive over the last number of years. Airlines are working on aggressively changing their distribution channel mix and looking to be able to retail their full offering whether directly on airline.com, through metasearch channels or through the traditional GDS model.
Bryan Porter, Chief Commercial Officer, OpenJaw Technologies, commented: ‘The distribution gamechanger for airlines is IATA’s NDC. OpenJaw considers NDC to be the catalyst to dramatically re-engineer how airlines retail their inventory mix and how they innovate by using an open industry standard. OpenJaw has been at the forefront of this standard via our involvement with IATA. Apart from delivering the core messaging functionality, we are actively innovating around NDC. We have recently launched a NDC Centre of Excellence in our head office in Dublin, where we have built a core team of NDC experts, and launched NDC innovations from servicing to selling, including personalised offers powered by the OpenJaw t-Data platform.’
New Hires
OpenJaw is delivering on the promise of expansion as announced at the Global Travel Summit in 2017. The organisation now has over 50 staff in the new Dalian office in China, formally opened in December 2017. The offices in Madrid, Dublin and Krakow have added another 50 staff last year, including a team of data scientists and data engineers.
OpenJaw Technologies CEO, Kieron Branagan said: ‘The Global Travel Summit is the place to learn about cutting-edge strategies, tools and techniques about travel retailing. OpenJaw believes that retailing is fuelling a revolution in how travel is purchased, so we are delighted to announce lots of new initiatives at the Summit. We particularly pleased to announce that the plans to double our global workforce to 450 employees are on track across all our offices, and we have been recruiting extensively.’
Branagan continued: ‘At OpenJaw, we are reimagining the future of travel retailing over the next few years, and the Global Travel Summit is part of that programme. New customers, new platforms and new products are the key ingredients in OpenJaw’s growth and in shaping the future of travel retailing.’
