Stories about: Orbitz

Anyone brave enough to type "cheap tickets" in a search engine can find a plethora of one-page Web sites designed to drive traffic to other Web sites and generate click-through advertising revenue.

Several IT executives at the LinuxWorld Summit last week reinforced the idea that Linux now has the technical brawn and industry support to accommodate the most demanding business applications in environments such as finance, airline reservations and stock trading.

When Cendant's Travel Distribution Services (TDS) division considered shifting its airline-fare system to Linux on Intel-based servers, the IT department couldn't simply flip the switch. The system handles 700 transactions per second in the course of processing millions of fares from more than 500 airlines around the world. So the IT team set aside a few months to do a careful analysis of the business case.

The open source community needs fewer licenses and the large number of software licenses used to release open source code is becoming a significant issue for developers and users, according to a senior HP executive speaking at the Linuxworld Conference & Expo.

Portraying his company as part of a global effort to create a larger worldwide software industry, Red Hat Chief Executive Officer Matthew Szulik opened the LinuxWorld Conference & Expo in San Francisco on Tuesday with a warning that the US runs the risk of missing out on the move toward open source.

Just three years ago, few IT people were thinking about the use of Linux on the desktop at their companies.

At financial services giant Merrill Lynch & Co., CTO John McKinley is blazing a trail to boost productivity and enhance ROI with his strategy. And that trail has led him to pursue a company-wide deployment of Linux open-source software.

Travel companies and the technology vendors that serve them are calling for open standards to integrate travel packages, but the industry is so mired in legacy technology that it will likely be fighting that battle for years.

Galileo International Inc., one of the four major worldwide reservation systems that handle travel industry bookings, is implementing a Unix-based fare-pricing system that will enable it to change and publish fares more cheaply and quickly to meet the demands of travel Web sites.

Sun Microsystems has released its latest microprocessor, the UltraSPARC IIe. The chip is the low-cost version of Sun's 64-bit processor and is available in 400 and 500MHz versions.