Philippine's National Flag Carrier Standardizes on StarOffice Suite

Phillppines Airlines saves US$300,000 in cost avoidance.

"By using Sun's StarOffice as our standard office productivity application, we estimated that we saved the company more than US$300,000 in terms of cost avoided. In addition, the deployment of Star Office allowed us ensure the use of legitimate software on all our desktops company-wide, while avoiding being infected by a number of M.S. Office-prone viruses. ", Kevin Y. Hartigan-Go, Vice-President, Information Systems Department, Philippine's Airlines, Inc.

Organization

• Philippine Airlines, Inc

Industry

• Transportation

Configuration

• StarOffice5.2 Productivity Suite
  
• PCs running Windows 95/98/NT, Linux and OS/2

Challenges

• Office automation with a tight budget
  
• Ensure use of legitimate applications throughout the organization
  
• Look for alternative to Microsoft Office
  
• Achieve criteria such as price, basic functionality, practicality of features and most importantly, compatibility.

*Results

• Savings of more than US$300,000 in cost avoided
• Further savings in productivity loss because of avoidance of virus infections
• Deployed StarOffice on 400 terminals and intends to install it in all new PCs

In 1998 Philippine Airlines (PAL) was facing financial difficulties and had limited budgets for any investments. In addition, the country had also joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in signing the Intellectual Property Law, and had launched a campaign for companies to use legitimate software. When PAL wanted to implement office automation, these factors influenced the airlines to choose StarOffice in its office automation efforts, saving it a massive US$300,000 in cost avoidance. It also discovered the advantages of deploying StarOffice when it was spared from recent virus attacks.

Cost-cutting challenges & Legitimate Software
Usage Philippine Airlines, Inc. is the National Flag carrier of the Philippines, with a fleet of over 30 aircraft, operating to over 40 domestic and international destinations. With 7,500 employees, Philippine airlines has been serving the public for over 60 years and is considered Asia's oldest airline.

Emerging from the brink of financial collapse in 1998, Philippine Airlines has been rebuilding itself with austere cost-cutting measures. However, in recognizing the value of using information technology to boost employee productivity in the office environment, it faced a massive challenge to choose an office productivity software suite for its employees with a tight budget.

The airlines was also obligated to ensure the use of legitimate software applications throughout its organization. Philippines had joined the fight against software piracy when it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) in signing the Intellectual Property Law.

Faced with these circumstances, PAL had initially intended to use Microsoft Office, the de facto standard in the industry, and license it for the entire company. In fact, it had already started negotiations with a number of vendors when Microsoft increased the prices of its Office upgrades and changed its licensing options, which inflated the overall cost of ownership for PAL. PAL had a base of more than 1000 Pcs and these were expected to grow. The airline was therefore compelled to look for a cheaper alternative.

In choosing an alternative solution, PAL identified several criteria like price, basic functionality, practicality of features and compatibility. "Essentially if you did not need to communicate with anybody else, any office application would actually serve your purpose. Most users only use less than 20 percent of the features of an office application anyway. And most of the features that we needed were already served by even earlier versions of our MS Office applications. However, in this Internet age, we constantly need to share our files with other people, not just in Philippine Airlines, but also with other companies. This was the most important criteria." said Kevin Y. Hartigan-Go, Vice-President, Information Systems Department, Philippine's Airlines, Inc.

According to Mr Hartigan-Go, PAL eventually selected StarOffice for the following reasons:

1. It offers the best compatibility with MS Office file formats.
   
2. It was quite easy to use and learn
   
3. It ran on a different platforms, like OS/2 and Linux.
   
4. Star Office also provides other features like a graphic editor, email client and HTML editor

Additional Benefits: Avoid Windows-prone Virus Attacks
By using StarOffice, PAL realized that the organization had been spared from virus attacks such as the recent Code Red, Nimda and other virus which infect by using macros.

"Recently, we realized that there were a lot of additional benefits to using Star Office. One benefit for instance is protection from macro viruses that infect Word and Excel documents. Since these macros do not run in Star Office, such viruses do not affect us. And by running StarOffice on a Linux platform with X windows, it virtually protects you one hundred percent against any of the windows viruses." said Hartigan-Go.

Today, StarOffice is currently the company's standard Office application. PAL uses StarOffice on multiple platforms which include StarOffice on OS/2, Windows 95, 98, and Linux. Approximately 400 of its terminals now run StarOffice and PAL intends to preload all its new PCs with StarOffice suites.

"By using StarOffice as our standard office application, we estimated that we saved the airline more than US$300,000 in cost avoidance. This amount would have significantly been more if we consider the fact that deploying StarOffice also allowed us to avoid being infecting by Windows-prone viruses."

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