<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2">Continental Airlines Inc. uses Teradata's technology at its massive data warehouse, which stores information on all aspects of the airline's business, including passenger reservations, aircraft maintenance and parts inventories, and flight delays. Using middleware like IBM's WebSphere MQ and Informatica Corp.'s Striva, transactional data is captured and loaded into the data warehouse within seconds, says data warehousing director Alicia Acebo.
Continental has designed its data warehouse so that it can be used for both real-time alerts and long-range strategic analysis. It warns reservations clerks of any incoming flight delays, for example, and identifies passengers designated as most-valuable customers, who can then be given priority on alternative flights if it appears they'll miss their scheduled connections. Business analysts also can use Continental's data warehouse to study historical data to detect customer trends.</font>