PilotFish in the News

OpenTravel Alliance Partners with PilotFish Technology for FastRez™

Tool Will Cut Validation Time from Days to Seconds

(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 21, 2009 – OpenTravel Alliance and PilotFish Technology have announced a strategic partnership that will further enhance OpenTravel Alliance’s FastRez™ software.  FastRez is the first connectivity solution to seamlessly automate reservations for smaller hospitality companies. FastRez was already designed to cut implementation time in half for smaller hotels and chains or those with limited IT capabilities.  With the addition of PilotFish Technology’s automated validation service, companies will be able to further reduce the time it takes to test their FastRez transactions for compliance before going into production.

“FastRez is based on the OpenTravel XML standard schema, which are widely used, mature and stable,” said John Lambe, chair of OpenTravel and CTO of OpenJaw Technologies.  “Partnering with a well-respected software tools and services provider like PilotFish provides FastRez customers with the best of both worlds – proven schemas and a valuable implementation tool. We think this is a smart partnership for OpenTravel.”

“With this validation service, companies that purchase FastRez can validate their systems’ input and output transactions by simply attaching samples of the transactions to an e-mail and sending them to an e-mail address for validation” said Valyn Perini, executive director of OpenTravel.  “Within seconds they will get a report sent back to them indicating if the sample transaction is valid.  It’s almost instantaneous and drastically reduces the time to market.”

Included with FastRez is the XML schema, supporting documentation and an e-mail address for validating test schema.  “I have seen other companies charge $400 every time someone needed to validate transactions,” said Monika Vainius, Marketing Director for PilotFish. “With this, a developer can submit test transactions for validation, then make changes and resubmit as many times as needed.  It saves both time and money.”

In conjunction with the FastRez release, PilotFish is offering a bundle of its world class integration tools, the XCS eiPlatform and eiConsole, to enable the rapid implementation of the FastRez standard. Using the FastRez schemas as a common format, the PilotFish integration tools will enable companies to build, test, deploy, and monitor FastRez-compliant interfaces between any internal or external systems regardless of their data format, platform, operating system, database, or communication protocol.

OpenTravel will launch FastRez in April 2009.

About OpenTravel Alliance
OpenTravel’s mission is to engineer specifications that make data transmission flow smoothly throughout travel, tourism and hospitality. OpenTravel creates, expands and drives adoption of open universal data specifications, including but not limited to the use of XML, for the electronic exchange of business information among all sectors of the travel industry. 

With a diversified membership representing influential names in all sectors of the travel industry, OpenTravel is comprised of representatives from airlines, car rental firms, hotels, cruise lines, leisure suppliers, service providers, tour operators, travel agencies, and trade associations. For more information, visit www.opentravel.org.

About PilotFish Technology
Based in Middletown, CT, PilotFish Technology provides comprehensive software and services to enable the integration of disparate systems using XML standards.  To learn more visit www.pilotfishtechnology.com. For public relations and company information, please contact Monika Vainius, Marketing Director at 860-632-9900 ext. 303.