Case studies: Opodo

Voice and data network for new Head Quarters

"Cisilion’s telephony expertise, technical know how and quick ability to understand and anticipate our needs helped to make our office move to Hammersmith a smooth and seamless transition. We look forward to continuing to work with them as Opodo expands across Europe."

Eric Mody, IT Support Manager, Opodo.

The customer

Opodo is the only truly Pan-European company. Originally set up as a joint venture between nine of Europe's leading airlines - Aer Lingus, Air France, Alitalia, Austrian Airlines, British Airways, Finnair, Iberia, KLM, Lufthansa. Amadeus the technology and travel distribution company took a 55% controlling share in 2004, later increasing this to 75%.

The first Opodo site was launched in Germany in 2001 swiftly followed by the UK and France. Today Opodo operates in nine markets and Opodo customers can enjoy access to flights from 500 airlines, 45,000 hotel properties and over 7,000 car hire locations, package holidays, city breaks, ski deals tailor made holidays, travel insurance and value added services such as airport parking.

The challenge

Opodo’s UK headquarters were initially run from managed offices off Leicester Square in London. In November 2003 their contract was up for renewal and as the company had outgrown its managed offices, a decision was made to move into their own offices in Hammersmith.

Cisilion engaged with Opodo to provide a new network and telephone infrastructure for their new offices.

Solution snapshot

New voice and data network

The solution

Cisilion deployed a core Cisco Catalyst 6509 with added resilience to provide LAN connectivity and inline power. Every active floor port was cabled back to the core 6509, and Cisco 7960 IP Phones were deployed to each desk.

Two highly resilient Cisco Callmanager servers were deployed in a redundant configuration to control all the handsets and a central Cisco Unity server integrated with the mail system to provide unified messaging functionality for the telephone users.

Connections to the PSTN were housed on redundant PRI links and fax machines connected to Cisco ATA 186’s. Data and voice VLANs were also created to segregate voice traffic and QoS Configured to ensure voice quality was maintained.

External services were also configured in a highly redundant fashion to avoid outages on failure or key equipment.

Opodo used ‘Extension Mobility’ to allow individuals to log in and out of their telephones, giving them flexibility for add-ons, moves and changes and control over the destination of telephone calls. Attendant Consoles were also used for receptionists to share the load for inbound calls on Opodo’s main switchboard numbers.

Recently Opodo has been growing in staff numbers to such an extent that they are adding significant numbers of new handsets, which is easily within the administrative domain of their IT Support Staff, thus reducing the costs of cabling and configuration of a centralised PBX.

Opodo hope to deploy xml based applications internally at some stage in the near future to give added benefit to their employees.