Scandinavian Airlines (SAS) has cuts its spending on business intelligence (BI) by half by moving its platform to Microsoft Windows.

The move will allow SAS to reuse its established data warehousing applications without the need for new coding. As a result, the company has reduced its BI and associated housing costs by 50 per cent.

Feedback on customer activities such as online bookings and check-ins is now faster, as the time taken to process a single batch of BI information has dropped from six to two hours, the airline said. The airline now expects to pay off the cost of the project within 18 months.

“By reusing our existing data warehousing applications in a Windows environment, we delivered the new system much faster than if we had attempted a rewrite,” said Per Pettersson, system manager, enterprise data warehouse at SAS.

“At the same time, we were able to provide a better development environment for our programmers.”

SAS used Micro Focus’ Revolve analysis tool to maximise the efficiency of the transition.