CASE STUDY - Prime Numbers Technology Revolutionizes the Analysis of Corporate Travel Spending with Open Source Data Integration: Open Source Data Integration Simplifies, Streamlines, and Improves Business Travel Programs
Commentary by Rock Blanco, President, Prime Numbers Technology
A Revolutionary Approach to Corporate Travel
Prime Numbers Technology is among the world’s largest global benchmarking tracking services. The company’s flagship product, Travel GPA, offers a complete travel program management and analysis service that provides in-depth analysis of a company’s overall travel program performance based on policy compliance and performance against other companies in the Travel GPA database. Overall, the system tracks all trip data, customer activity, and customer profiles to help agents make better decisions faster.
Real-Time Travel Data
In today’s fiercely competitive travel industry, margins are tighter than ever and unforeseen events unfold at a phenomenal rate. Travel GPA leverages real-time travel data and history from tens of thousands of companies around the world and provides a basis for establishing travel policies and programs that can improve a company’s bottom line. The data can be scored against internal goals or benchmarked against the Travel GPA database, which comprises more than 17,000 companies and totals more than $4 billion in annual travel spending.
Travel GPA Runs on Talend
After years of custom coding, Prime Numbers Technology needed to find a more robust way of developing and integrating their data integration processes. The company evaluated Talend’s open source data integration solutions based on recommendations from peers in the travel industry. After a few weeks of prototyping, Prime Numbers Technology invested in a subscription license of Talend Integration Suite—Talend’s enterprise-grade data integration platform. Talend Integration Suite extends Talend Open Studio with value-added features for job deployment, scheduling and monitoring, a multi-user development repository, technical support with guaranteed service-level agreements, and IP indemnification. “The fact that Talend Open Studio and Talend Integration Suite share the same development environment made it completely seamless to move from one to the other, and we were able to deploy immediately all the prototyping work we had done with the free product,” said Rock Blanco, president of Prime Numbers Technology.
Talend Integration Suite is now central to Travel GPA, automatically consolidating data from multiple feeds. “We’re handling billions of transactions,” said Blanco, “and we interface with a huge number of diverse sources and a variety of data. We might be dealing with 45 different currencies and perhaps 18 different languages or we might need to merge an HR feed to a particular system. Before Talend, and using the tools that were available at the time, it took us 3 to 4 years to build the 15-plus different interfaces we needed. We replicated all those interfaces on Talend in three months. That’s more than a 90 percent increase in productivity!”
"Talend pulled the travel industry out of the Middle Ages." —Rock Blanco, President, Prime Numbers Technology
Speed and the ability to reuse code weren’t the only criteria. “Our database is growing exponentially because every second someone, somewhere in the world, is sending data to Travel GPA, and Talend Integration Suite keeps it constantly updated,” Blanco added. “In terms of data mining, Talend pulled the travel industry out of the Middle Ages.
“Our business is data,” he continued. “With Talend we’ve got a fast, reliable dashboard that gives companies a consolidated view of their performance in real time. Using Talend’s connectors I can take extracts from any source.
“Talend has given us the ability to reach into markets we couldn’t target before,” Blanco concluded. “We didn’t have the right tools to handle data collection and consolidation in an appropriate time frame with the resources we had available. We would have needed an entire department and a huge budget to do what Talend Integration Suite lets us do with just a handful of people. Talend is the reason that we’re in business today.”
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This article originally appeared in the issue of .