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The Swiss IT veteran, who joined Emirates Group in February 2006, has an impressive resume, dotted with key technology positions in a Swiss bank, Hewlett-Packard and Swissair. He holds two Masters degrees, one in computer engineering and another in business administration.
Naef holds two senior vice president positions. One for IT in the Emirates Group; the other at Mercator, the IT division within the Group that provides IT products and services for Emirates Airline and rival carriers, which contribute about 20 percent to Mercator's business.
Despite the events of 9/11, Naef says, the Dubai-based airline has managed to grow its business by more than 20 percent every year, thanks to a sound economy in the United Arab Emirates.
In an exclusive phone interview with ZDNet Asia, Naef discusses the business-IT partnership within Emirates, the company's in-house development strategy, and the barriers to getting the global travel industry to fully adopt e-ticketing. He also shares why he thinks in-flight use of cellphones may not take off after all.
What technology efforts are in the pipeline at Emirates, and what do you deem is most important?
On the infrastructure side, we have a project going on to move most of our applications to Linux. We already have a lot of our business critical applications running on Linux, so we are moving away from proprietary systems. We have identified about 180 applications that we want to move to Linux within six to 12 months.
We've also standardized our infrastructure on blades, and that's going to give us an interesting cost base, because we saw that applications that moved to Linux and blades performed much better. The underlying infrastructure is much more economical than being on AIX or Sun Solaris.
In data communications, airlines are known to be fairly traditional in communicating with outstations. There are a lot of leased lines and data communications protocols, which are fairly expensive with low bandwidth. We are aggressively moving away from these proprietary communication protocols, and will make use of VPN (virtual private network) over the public Internet. That's going to be a big shift which will increase bandwidth and reduce costs dramatically.
The big thing for us now is our new-generation cargo management system, to which we successful cut over a few weeks ago. We spent more than 300 man-years in developing that solution and it's our next big thing to push into the market. We have a long list of leads because there is nothing comparable out there. A lot of carriers still sit on legacy cargo management system which they need to replace.
It's always been a tradition in Emirates to go for in-house developed solutions instead of buying standard ones in the market, because we've had bad experience with some components that we purchased.
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How do you manage the cost of developing your own applications, as opposed to buying off the shelf?
Interestingly, we have a very attractive cost base particularly because we have access to lower-cost resources. There is tendency to go out and purchase solutions, but there is no fully-integrated IT solution for airlines.
When I was at a manufacturing company in Switzerland, we did everything with SAP. But there's no such thing as an SAP system for airlines or an aviation group like us. If we go for standard solutions, we end up with an enormous patchwork of different technologies and thousands of interfaces to integrate, as we did in the past. My strategy is to get away from that 'best-of-breed' approach of having to manage several different systems.
As there is no integrated system in the market, we have to do it ourselves. We will introduce a service-oriented architecture as the backbone of our development. Whatever system we develop will be fully integrated into that architecture.
How would you rank Emirates among competitors in terms of its maturity in IT adoption?
I think we are well ahead of competitors in terms of automation, that is, how much internal processes are automated. When I look at our in-house developed applications, they are impressive, which is also why a lot of airlines want to purchase our solutions.
Whoever buys our solutions also knows that they are proven, because a big airline like Emirates is using them successfully. We never sell a product that's not used by Emirates.
While selling products to rival airlines, how do you ensure that Emirates stays on top of the pack?
I have established an executive IT steering board where the two presidents and four executive vice presidents from the Emirates Group meet on a regular basis to decide on the strategic direction of IT. We decide on which product to sell in the market, and which ones we do not.
In the past, there have been products which the presidents have decided not to sell, because they want to keep the competitive advantage. But typically, it's only for a period of, say, six to 12 months, if we decide not to sell something to a competitor. That said, we do not just sit back and rest on our laurels. There is a constant innovation cycle going on to improve our systems so as to stay on top of the competition.
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With the changes Patrick has brought into our IT i expect Emirates IT to grow....kudos to Patrick
Posted by Sajid on Friday, December 22 2006 02:31 AM