MEDIA ADVISORY

Orbitz Unveils New Open Source Software for High Speed Event Processing, Application Monitoring, Analytics and Graphing

StreamBase’s CEP platform, combined with Java and Python-based Software Saves Time and Resources by Pinpointing Anomalies

CHICAGO, IL, June 30, 2008  — Orbitz Worldwide (NYSE: OWW), a leading global online travel company, today announced the release of two new open source projects, demonstrating its continued commitment to its usage of open source and to the community of open source users worldwide.  The components are part of a Complex Event Processing system designed to monitor large distributed applications, analyze the data that is gathered and display that data in real-time graphs. 

The Java-based Extremely Reusable Monitoring API (ERMA) provides increased efficiencies by reducing the amount of time it takes to identify customer-impacting events caused by software availability, reliability, and performance issues.  Graphite, written in Python, is a highly scalable real-time graphing system designed to handle large amounts of numeric time-series data.   Used together with StreamBase, a high-performance event processing engine, ERMA and Graphite save Orbitz valuable time and resources by allowing production support personnel to easily identify and then correct any application irregularities.

For example, if an Orbitz customer is purchasing a plane ticket online and receives an error notification, the Orbitz team can immediately determine exactly where in the chain of communication the error took place and address it.  This leads to less site down-time and increased customer satisfaction.  Errors like these can then be tracked over time and viewed on a dashboard to indicate trends and provide insights into how to further address any problems.

“When something goes wrong on our website, it directly affects the customer and we need to know exactly what happened and how to fix it,” said Matt O’Keefe, Senior Architect at Orbitz.  “With ERMA and Graphite used in conjunction with StreamBase, we can follow and process an entire chain of events associated with a user request, see where any glitch occurs, and fix it as soon as possible.”

“The Orbitz application is a good example of CEP in a highly-available, reliable and high performance environment.” said Mark Palmer, President and COO of StreamBase, “Orbtiz’ deployment of StreamBase is a testament to the broadening of applications that use streaming data to gain competitive business advantage.”

ERMA
The Orbitz Worldwide Data Centers host numerous travel agency web sites that utilize thousands of services to handle more than 18 million visitors per month.  ERMA dynamically correlates events across distributed services based on a user request, enabling efficient drill-down root cause analysis for errors and latency, as well as bottom-up impact analysis.  Orbitz has access to data for more than one hundred thousand distinct event types with minimal development cost as a result of applying ERMA to core architectural elements. 

StreamBase
Monitoring data corresponding to discrete events is streamed from ERMA to a StreamBase event processing application, where it is aggregated and processed with high throughput and low latency.  StreamBase is an industry leader in high-performance Complex Event Processing and their software enables Orbitz to rapidly analyze and act on real-time streaming data for instantaneous decision-making. StreamBase combines a rapid application development environment, a low-latency high-throughput event server, and broad connectivity to real-time and historical data.   The processed data is then sent from StreamBase to Graphite, Orbitz’s real-time data storage and graphing system. 

Graphite
Graphite allows users to write an application that will collect specific numeric time-series data.  Orbitz sends data from StreamBase to Graphite's processing backend, where it is stored in a specialized database and then visualized through Graphite's web interfaces.  The web front-end provides two distinct user interfaces for visualizing data in graphs, as well as a simple URL-based API for direct graph generation.  Graphite's design is focused on providing simple interfaces (both to users and applications), real-time visualization, high-availability, and enterprise scalability.  Graphite is best used to graph a large number of different items, such as like dozens of performance metrics from thousands of servers. 

Orbitz Worldwide is one of the premier technology organizations in e-commerce today.  For more information on the development of ERMA and Graphite, please visit http://erma.wikidot.com/ and http://graphite.wikidot.com/.  For more information on other Orbitz open source projects, please visit http://technology.orbitz.com. 
 
About Orbitz Worldwide

Orbitz Worldwide (NYSE: OWW) is a leading global online travel company that uses innovative technology to enable leisure and business travelers to research, plan and book a broad range of travel products. Orbitz Worldwide owns and operates a portfolio of consumer brands that includes Orbitz (http://www.orbitz.com/), CheapTickets (http://www.cheaptickets.com/), ebookers (http://www.ebookers.com/), HotelClub (http://www.hotelclub.com/), RatesToGo (http://www.ratestogo.com/), the Away Network (http://www.away.com/) and corporate travel brand Orbitz for Business (http://www.orbitzforbusiness.com/). For more information on how your company can partner with Orbitz Worldwide, visit http://corp.orbitz.com

About StreamBase

StreamBase Systems, Inc, a leader in high-performance Complex Event Processing (CEP), provides software for rapidly building systems that analyze and act on real-time streaming data for instantaneous decision-making. StreamBase’s Event Processing Platform™ combines a rapid application development environment, an ultra low-latency high-throughput event server, and the broadest connectivity to real-time and historical data. Leading investment banks, hedge funds, and government agencies use StreamBase to power mission-critical applications that increase revenue, lower costs, and reduce risk. The company is headquartered in Lexington, Massachusetts. For more information, visit http://www.streambase.com.