One of Australia's largest travel agencies, Traveland, has replaced its legacy Unix-based systems and selected Intel Architecture-based servers as the foundation for a total redevelopment of its computing environment.

Growing from 170 offices in 1998 to 415 offices in 2000, and managing 7.5 million product transactions per day, Traveland was pushing the capabilities of its ageing transactional computing environment.

It had to meet the new demands of e-business and integrate into the Internet making it the primary channel for customer communications.

The company is set to start a 12-month rollout of Microsoft Windows 2000 Advanced Server, Microsoft SQL Server and OLAP Services, Systems Union Sun Financials and point-of-sale terminals.

Centralising data will improve upon previous batch-oriented transaction processing by offering real-time views of company data, while Citrix MetaFrame will provide access to central databases from 600 desktop PCs at more than 100 Traveland owned retail outlets.

This year alone it will support more than $1 billion in transactional revenue.

The Intel Architecture-based servers include 14 single, quad and eight-way Intel Xeon-based servers for database and Web serving.

Traveland's Citrix MetaFrame server farm is based on 15 dual and four-way Intel Xeon servers.

The company's CIO Priyanka Paranagama said infrastructure has not kept step with the growth in the past three years.

"We needed to build a seamless, multichannel business that includes a single view of the customer, and made a conscious decision to go into Microsoft software and Intel Architecture-based servers," he said.

"Part of their appeal is eliminating the need to maintain multiple platforms. We rigorously tested them until we were confident they were going to provide the availability and resources for the many applications we will roll out in the future."