from DSSResources.comMLT Vacations Inc. tackles busy travel season with Oracle(r) on LinuxLINUXWORLD, BOSTON, MA, Feb. 15, 2005 -- Oracle today announced that MLT Vacations Inc., one of the largest providers of vacation packages in the United States, is using Oracle(r) Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux to help reduce costs and help ensure that its reservation system and Web sites are up-and-running for travel agents and consumers booking vacations. With more than one million people purchasing trips from MLT Vacations Inc.'s two brands, NWA WorldVacations and Worry-Free Vacations, annually, the company needed a complete technology solution that would enable its central reservation system and critical information for its travel/partner Web sites to be available virtually all of the time. MLT Vacations Inc. is also using an Oracle Data Warehouse to capture essential information used to make key business decisions, such as analyzing buying behaviors, the busiest flight routes and the profitability of flights. By replacing expensive, proprietary UNIX servers with IBM servers running Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, MLT Vacations Inc. was able to improve system performance while decreasing technology costs. Oracle's long-standing commitment to the Linux platform, including validation and enterprise-class support for Oracle products running on Linux, was a decisive factor in MLT Vacations Inc.'s decision to deploy Linux. MLT Vacations Inc. expects to save approximately $1 million in software, hardware, training and maintenance costs over the next five years as a result of the investment. Due in part to the considerable savings, MLT Vacations Inc. plans to migrate its PeopleSoft 8 applications to an Oracle on Linux platform in 2005. "Moving to Oracle on Linux has exceeded our expectations in terms of performance and cost efficiencies," said Michael Kress, director of enterprise technology services at MLT Vacations Inc. "We were able to go live on the new system during the holidays, our busiest time of year, without an interruption in service. Our customers and extensive partner network were able to book and purchase vacations without a hiccup." Oracle Database and Oracle Real Application Clusters enable MLT Vacations Inc. to scale as needed to support changing business demands and to help with the company's disaster recovery planning. With this clustering environment, servers can be added or removed easily, as well as distributed across disparate locations, to provide a fault tolerant architecture. This environment also enables MLT Vacations Inc.'s Web site, reservation systems and applications to function during routine maintenance or when there is a problem with a server as the system can keep running should a server go down. About MLT Vacations Inc. MLT Vacations Inc.(r) is a wholly owned subsidiary of Northwest Airlines Corporation and one of the largest providers of vacation packages in the United States. Worry-Free Vacations offers charter vacation packages from seven U.S. cities to destinations in Mexico, the Caribbean, Las Vegas and Florida. NWA WorldVacations offers vacation packages via scheduled air service to destinations in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. For more information, visit a professional travel agent, www.worryfreevacations.com or www.nwaworldvacations.com. About Oracle Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) is the world's largest enterprise software company. For more information about Oracle, visit our Web site at http://www.oracle.com. # # # Trademarks Oracle is a registered trademark of Oracle Corporation and/or its affiliates. Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Eloy Ontiveros Oracle Corporation +1.650.607.6458 eloy.ontiveros@oracle.com |