The Dolphin family of products is now available via the Internet on the new “DolphinAnywhere” platform. Travel agents can now completely outsource their travel automation systems to the secure Dolphin Data Centre and access these systems via the Internet through a Web browser.
Dolphin Dynamics Ltd, developers of Dolphin for Windows, the leading edge office automation system for travel agencies, have announced the immediate availability of “DolphinAnywhere” at www.dolphinanywhere.com.
DolphinAnywhere is an Internet based travel system platform that allows travel agencies to centralise and outsource their travel systems to Dolphin Dynamics in order to consolidate their data and achieve considerable savings in their IT spend. So they can focus on selling travel without worrying about supporting or upgrading their travel systems.
DolphinAnywhere is ideal for multi-branch locations, agencies with off site accounts departments, home-workers and in general for all travel agencies looking to centralise all of their travel systems and access their valuable customer and financial data from anywhere. Working from home, providing remote out of hours service, accessing Dolphin to check the state of your business while on a business trip, all of these and more are possible, 24 hours a day, using DolphinAnywhere.
On the DolphinAnyhwere platform, Dolphin for Windows, the mid/back office system, and Dolphin Wave, the graphical GDS front end reservation tool, run on powerful Application Servers located in a secure data centre. They are accessible from a variety of platforms (Windows, Linux or Mac) using just an Internet connection and a Web browser.
Each travel agency that subscribes to the DolphinAnywhere service is allocated a secure partition on these servers. After simply logging onto www.dolphinanywhere.com with their user ID and password they have access to the range of Dolphin products, services and supporting information they have subscribed to without any concern for the sophisticated technology behind the scenes.
Security has been carefully considered in building the DolphinAnywhere platform. The physical servers are housed in a purpose built data centre that is resistant to power cuts, fire, smoke, other natural calamities and is manned by security guards 24 hours per day. All communication across the Web is encrypted and SSL, the industry standard security protocol, protects the DolphinAnyhwere login process.
Performance on DolphinAnywhere is actually better than most agencies would experience if they installed the suite of Dolphin products on their own computers. The combination of the high specification of the application servers in the data centre, the technical innovations in the Dolphin products and the Citrix Metaframe XP technology that delivers the applications to the user’s browser results in exceptional performance over any 56K or higher connection to the Internet. Citrix Metaframe is the leading thin client technology currently used by more than 80% of the fortune 500 companies.
Multi-branch agencies will realise immediate costs savings and all types of agencies will benefit from the accessibility DolphinAnywhere offers and save money over the medium and long term. The “thin client” computing model embodied in DolphinAnywhere will enable agencies to extend the life of their existing hardware as even old 486 machines with internet access can use the service, they won’t need to purchase dedicated database servers, employ additional IT staff or take up extra maintenance contracts to support those servers and they won’t need to install expensive lines between different offices. Finally, upfront costs are minimised as the DolphinAnywhere service is billed on a monthly basis and the number of users can be increased or decreased at any time.
Simon Wakeford, Project Manager for the DolphinAnywhere plaform says, “We are leveraging a technical infrastructure that has been used by many of our largest clients for almost 2 years and that we have extensively tested and fine tuned for the past 2 months with great results in terms of performance and reliability.”
Andy Steeds, Sales and Marketing Director says, “We have shown DolphinAnywhere to a few selected customers during the testing period and the interest has been tremendous. In fact we have two customers already signed up to go live during June. We have also experienced significant interest from many international clients that would otherwise find it too expensive to install the system in their own countries.”
Dolphin Dynamics President, Roberto Da Re says, “This is a use of the Internet that gives our customers immediate return on their investment. With high speed ADSL available for just £ 100 a month for the whole office, DolphinAnywhere is the ideal platform for the agency to eliminate all systems headaches. What you see today is only the first step of our roll out of an Internet enabled platform that will allow all our customers, large and small, to compete in the e-commerce arena. Watch this space!”
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