Novell Helps Star Alliance Manage Information Around - and Above - the Globe

Star Alliance, the airline network for Earth, has tapped Novell to protect its network while providing anytime, anywhere access to key information for the Alliance's vast global workforce. Using Novell® Nsure ™ secure identity management solutions, Star Alliance is improving its unified infrastructure to allow the 270,000 employees from its 14 members to easily and quickly obtain information they need to work effectively. The agreement provides Star Alliance with a solid, cost-effective and secure foundation to increase cooperation within the group, improving its ability to represent the Alliance as a true, single face to the customer.

Star Alliance is the first truly global airline alliance. Founded in 1997 by Lufthansa, United Airlines, SAS Scandinavian Airlines, Thai Airways International and Air Canada, the Alliance has since grown to 14 members, carrying a combined 300 million passengers each year on a network that serves 700 airports in 128 countries. The goal of Star Alliance is to offer passengers seamless, worldwide service. While important strides have been made, the Alliance is constantly striving to do more to harmonize processes and systems in order to make the travel experience easier and more comfortable for its customers. Since its membership entails diverse companies with multiple nationalities and global geographic distribution, it faced a daunting challenge in figuring out how to create a common network environment for employees. Seeking to enhance and improve its common infrastructure, Star Alliance turned to Novell.

"Serving our global customers effectively requires instant access to accurate and secure information," said Jaan Albrecht, CEO of Star Alliance. "Getting the right information to the right people at the right time is critical. Our industry is also inherently disbursed, and our employees, by definition, are very mobile. Our challenge was to come up with an approach that would give our members' employees - whether in Seoul, Chicago or Frankfurt - the ability to get onto the network and get what they need easily, quickly and securely. Novell gives us that power."

The Right Information to the Right People
Developing a comprehensive identity management solution for Star Alliance required both a good understanding of the business and technical challenges in the airline industry and products that could address the security, mobility and scalability needs of the group. Leveraging the identity management expertise of Novell consulting and the power of Novell technologies, combined with additional security technologies from Cryptovision, Star Alliance developed a multi-phase project to establish a common network access framework for all employees.

In the initial phase, the Alliance will create the Star Alliance Global Directory, which will centrally store and administer key user and resource information contributed by member airlines and the Star Alliance organization. This phase also includes establishing an authentication framework to ensure control of access to the network, as well as encryption of key data. In the second phase of the project, the Global Directory will expand to include nearly all users and resources on the Star Alliance network. With the new system, which will govern access for all employees of member airlines, critical information about changes in individual member airlines will be automatically synchronized to the Global Directory, keeping information up to date in real time. When completed, the new system will support cross-airline application access, enabling employees of one member airline to use applications hosted at and controlled by another member airline using a defined role or profile.

"This deal - one of the largest in Novell's history - clearly illustrates how secure identity management has become a key business challenge for large organizations," said Jack Messman, chairman and CEO of Novell. "While few companies have the large employee base of an entity like Star Alliance, organizations trying to manage identities for employees, customers, partners and suppliers quickly are dealing with very large numbers. Novell can meet the security and scalability requirements that companies need to handle complex identity management challenges."

Beyond contracting with Novell consulting for the development and implementation of this project, Star Alliance is licensing a range of Novell technologies, including Novell eDirectory™, Novell iChain®, a specially developed Novell DirXML® Airline Integration Driver and the Novell exteNd™ Enterprise Server.