Oracle Customer Success—United Airlines

United Airlines Soars with Oracle Linux

Oracle Linux and Ksplice have been game changers for United. We’ve consolidated our IT environment, eliminated vulnerabilities, and streamlined security compliance—we can now roll out patches with zero downtime.

— Marshall Weymouth, Senior Manager, Platform Engineering, United Airlines

United Airlines Boosts Application Availability, Achieves Zero-Downtime Patching, and Elevates Security with Dynamic Linux Management

With 4,500 flights touching down in more than 300 airports spanning five continents each day, United Airlines, its employees, and its customers are in a state of perpetual motion. To consistently ensure a superior customer experience, the company has to ensure maximum uptime for both internal- and external-facing applications.

United relies on Oracle Linux and Ksplice to optimize application availability and simplify its overall change management process, enabling it to roll out patches with zero downtime. Oracle Linux and Ksplice allowed United to boost security and service level agreement (SLA) compliance with an automated and fully documented patching regimen.

United Airlines Eliminates Vulnerabilities Using Oracle Linux

Business Challenge

Optimize availability of United’s critical internal- and passenger-facing applications to ensure a superior customer experience from first contact through return trip
Ensure business continuity as United integrated operations following its merger with Continental Airlines

Boost IT team productivity to enable members to focus more time and resources on innovation that boosts competitive advantage and less time on routine maintenance
Improve security compliance and streamline audit execution
Minimize IT footprint through consolidation, including operating systems

Improved application management, streamlined change management and accelerated time-to-value by adopting Oracle Linux
Reduced IT complexity by standardizing Linux systems

Gained the ability to roll out patches with zero downtime, ensuring high availability of critical internal- and customer-facing applications and boosting SLA compliance
Elevated security and compliance with internal and external audits, and saved significant time with automated, dynamic, and fully-documented patching and management capabilities
Gained the ability to patch more than 1,500 servers in a few evenings versus a few months—freeing IT team members to focus on IT initiatives that drive innovation across the airline, which had completed a large merger
Benefitted from Oracle Linux’s 100 percent binary capability with Red Hat, which helped to strengthen relationships with and support from other software vendors

With Oracle Linux, we found an operating system that lets us maximize the uptime of our applications. The ability to patch our kernel live with Ksplice, without a reboot, is a huge win. It also helps us meet security compliance patching requirements.

— Marshall Weymouth, Senior Manager, Platform Engineering, United Airlines

Execution

“As a long-time Oracle customer, the idea of Oracle-on-Oracle is ideal for us. It gives us one vendor to call for support. Adopting Oracle Linux was an easy and logical next step,” Weymouth said.

About United Airlines

Headquarters

Chicago, IL, United States

Employees

84,000

Annual Revenue

$36.5 billion

United Airlines

United Airlines and United Express operate more than 4,500 flights a day to 339 airports across five continents. In 2016, the organization operated more than 1.6 million flights carrying more than 143 million customers. United, a founding member of Star Alliance, has the world’s most comprehensive route network, including U.S. mainland hubs in Chicago, Denver, Houston, Los Angeles, New York/Newark, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.

Oracle Solutions Used

Oracle Linux

Oracle Linux Premier

Published: Jun 28, 2018