WorldTravelVision - ICEPortal
The Objective
WorldTravelVision, currently known as ICEPortal, is one of the two biggest content providers for travel related visual content on the Internet. ICEPortal has been producing, packaging and distributing visual content on the web for the last 7 years. ICEPortal has distributed this content in a form of digital brochures, which were hosted on ICEPortal's site and accessed via URLs from third party sites. Experiencing rapid customer grows ICEPortal needed to improve its technology, streamline content creation and management processes, and create an online platform capable of supporting the volume it intended to achieve.
The Analysis
TDS began by evaluating the set of immediate requirements, presented by the customer, as well as performing end-to-end problem space analysis. The result was a proposal which was above and beyond the original scope of the requirements, while representing a clear value in improving the technology, quality of service and providing features, which would differentiate ICEPortal from its competition.
The Solution
Leveraging Microsoft .NET technology along with Microsoft SQL Server, TDS software engineers developed a scalable, manageable and upgradeable web platform. During the development process the drive to make the final product ‘feature rich’ and capable never ceased. TDS was able to incorporate requests for additional functionality most efficiently due to its iterative development process and the ability to scale the team size allocated to the project. Shipped platform included features, such as brochure creation management tool, invoicing, brochure smart links, live image manipulation abilities, co-branding, customization, XML interfaces and many others making ICEPortal the easiest to use and most efficient visual content management and distribution system on the Web.
Deployment and Support
Once the product was ready to ship TDS continued its involvement by driving complete product roll out to the live environment. TDS was selected to provide ongoing maintenance, support and upgrades for ICEPortal, and has successfully done that ever since providing 99.99% uptime for the service. A dedicated offshore development and maintenance team was allocated for the client with dedicated resources and infrastructure, allowing for 24x7 support and realizing significant economic advantage for the client.
Cost Benefits
By defining the optimum mix of onsite management and offshore work, TDS was able to provide the client with financial benefits of doing offshore software development while maintaining consistently high quality of the deliverables throughout the course of the project. Cost savings also resulted from the fact that efficiency grew as a dedicated team of developers became more familiar with the technical and business issues of the project.
The Success
While the collaboration between TDS and ICEPortal (currently known as ICEPortal) is still ongoing, the results are a hard to underestimate. With the new software platform ICEPortal has grown into a visual content distribution powerhouse, providing over a million of content views per day, growing about 8% every month. Major players in travel industry such as Orbitz, Travelocity and others have recognized the value of this technology and have partnered with ICEPortal since. TDS team is very happy to be a part of this success story.