Open source is key, says Lastminute.com CTO

There were some technology partner announcements between Lastminute and Microsoft last year around .Net. How much of the site is actually engineered around .Net?
We primarily stayed with open-source technology. Almost everything we do is in Java. So it's all J2EE. Almost all the operating systems are Linux, we do have some Solaris on our databases and we use open-source middleware, which is Jboss. Almost all our development tools are from the open-source community. The guys love to deal with open source and get involved in the community. If we want to make changes to Jboss -- we usually get the changes overnight. Try doing that with Weblogic or Websphere or whatever. The trade-off is that you need guys with a lot of expertise. But since what we have to do the rest of the time is very high-tech then we have to have those guys anyway. So it's no additional investment to us but to people who aren't building a big e-commerce platform it's an extra cost.

Have you ever considered Linux desktop internally?
Sure. Some of the guys have. But we have so many connections to suppliers plus we're a big email user and getting full email connectivity would be difficult at this stage. We email all the time -- we send email confirmations of electronic tickets, so all that has to work well, that would be my own worry about converting from Windows to a Linux desktop. It would mean having things like Ximian working seamlessly without us having to go through too many integration issues. It is almost there and some people are doing it but I think they are mostly internal projects that they have a compelling reason for. We might be able to save some money over time but I think it's something to look at on the horizon.

With a lot of these relationships Lastminute has with like Trainline, Tesco.com, Iberia.com -- is a lot of your time spent with integration issues?
Well, yeah, 20 percent. Integration is at multiple levels though: there's connectivity, we might get a data feed from somebody else or we're feeding them. In Trainline's case we give them our inventory too. It's a two-way Web-services or XML feed but the data's different so you have to normalise all that. We have very sophisticated communication architecture. Probably more sophisticated than any other travel company, which is an advantage because once you've figured out how to do it, you can connect new people more easily.

Do most of your partners have the Web-services or XML expertise to contribute to the relationship?
I think in about 80 percent of cases they will have in-house expertise but in 20 percent of cases we will help them or accommodate whatever they have.

Do you feel that Lastminute is a software or services provider now as much as a travel portal?
Oh definitely. With the hook up with the Trainline, we wrote an XML specification that was a 100-page document of schemas, back-up and recovery, etc. They started writing to the specifications so it's exactly like you're a software provider. And a lot of the guys I have hired have worked in software companies and have built real products.

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