Now that we have finished the second quarter, we wanted to share some exciting platform updates that we released this quarter and provide some insight into upcoming releases.

Many of you are familiar with our different products, but what you may not realize is that our products are specific combinations of features and functions built on four technology platforms designed to integrate seamlessly with each other. These features and functions focus on data acquisition services, data normalization, data warehousing, reporting, business intelligence, and analytics.

iBank® Platform

The iBank team continues to migrate and rollout existing iBank reports in the new .NET code base. We have rolled out 15% of total reports to the new servers, and plan to finish the remaining 85% in Q3 and Q4. The 15% of released reports represent more than 50% of the total reporting volume – we made sure to update the most used reports first. As a reminder, the new iBank infrastructure allows us to deliver new capabilities to you, faster and with more flexibility.

We are already seeing the results of this work with our Air Activity, Rail Activity, Arrivals, Departures, and Upcoming Plans reports.  In Q2, as a direct result of the investment in our updated code base, we were able to fix defects in 90% less time.

We also wanted to provide a bit more information regarding an upcoming project we shared in our Q1 update. In April, we kicked off a major project, codename: Project Basin. We call it Project Basin because it covers everything but the kitchen sink.

Project Basin is a massive investment we are making to enhance our iBank Data Services. Our current data acquisition capability in iBank is focused on GDS reservation data and Back Office Invoicing data.  We leverage our TravelOptix® for additional types of data acquisition, specifically from booking providers like Farelogix and expense data.

The work we are doing with Project Basin will enable us to provide you with a single point of data acquisition for all your data, in any form, from just about any source. With Project Basin as the single point of data acquisition, your data is consolidated, cleansed, and normalized into a single set that can be consumed by any of our services or any other specialized third-party that you may work with. We expect to work on the Project Basin capabilities throughout Q3, and plan to begin to release functionality to the market, most specifically related to data cleansing, towards the end of Q3 and Q4.

iQCX® Platform

We continued to work closely with our GDS partners throughout the second quarter. We migrated almost all our customers to the new Web Services standard for Amadeus.

After gathering requirements in Q1, we have released several data capture enhancements for Ancillary Services and EMDs for both Sabre and Amadeus. We completed the development of the new iQCX Ticketing Module for Amadeus Web Services in Q2, and are now testing the new capabilities, which include the issuance of EMDs. We are planning a market-wide release of the new capabilities in Q3.

We completed the deployment of the new Composer version (version 4.1) to all our ResRule writers. This update improves security, stability, and performance.

We released 56 enhancements to the iQCX platform this quarter. To learn more, contact your Cornerstone account manager.

TravelOptix® Platform

In the second quarter, the TravelOptix team focused on building a set of standard Apps on the TravelOptix platform. Standard Apps are available with pre-defined analytics and filters – together these are called “Sheets.” Standard Apps are a great way to for customers who are new to TravelOptix to gain access to the platform and learn what the platform can do.

The standard Apps that have been completed are Spend Analysis App™, Farechecker App™, and TicketTRAK App™. Contact your account manager or Christine Dohmen to learn more about these Apps.

In addition to the standard Apps, we can now offer Custom Apps. These can either be built off a standard App, with modifications to data sources or data fields, or a brand-new App. With Custom Apps, our professional services team can design and build the right App, or set of Apps, for your unique business needs. In doing this, we can help you create a more strategic outlook for your travel program.

We also completed an underlying platform upgrade to continue to provide new features and faster processing. With this upgrade, we were able to double the hardware and resources available, driving more redundancy and greater capacity across the platform. We also separated our maintenance services so that we can ensure our real-time analytics engines maintain an extremely fast and consistent level of performance.

4site® Platform

The second quarter saw our 4site platform push the boundaries with our first wave of early adopters. We are currently managing almost 100k unique bookings per month on behalf of 7 travel management companies. These bookings represent 30,000 travelers. In addition, we are managing more than 5,000 segments every day.

Our enhancements in Q2 focused on the platform’s notification capabilities and dashboard rendering. We worked to make sure data loaded more efficiently and maps rendered faster. If you are interested in learning more about 4site, please contact your account manager or email ask@ciswired.com for a demo.