Lufthansa Cargo boards IBS Software’s SaaS hosting platform for five years

March 11, 2020: IBS Software signed a five-year contract with Lufthansa Cargo to take full ownership of the hosting and maintenance of Lufthansa Cargo’s iCAP cargo handling application platform, which is powered by IBS Software’s iCargo, a cargo management platform.

Lufthansa Cargo’s decision to move to IBS Software’s software as a service (SaaS) hosting platform is part of its long-term objective to focus on its core cargo business without compromising on IT operations. As part of the decision-making process, Lufthansa Cargo evaluated the capabilities of global hosting service providers on critical areas including application availability, security regulatory, and data privacy.

iCargo is an integrated solution that supports the end-to-end business functions such as cargo reservations, rating, manifesting, import & export operations, warehouse management, revenue accounting, airmail handling and revenue management of cargo carrying airlines and ground handlers. iCargo follows the air cargo industry best practices and is fully compliant with global industry standards and initiatives such as Cargo iQ, C-XML, OneRecord, e-AWB and e-Freight.

Lufthansa Cargo stands to benefit from IBS Software’s industry-first ‘zero outage‘ capability for its SaaS offering. With zero outage capability, planned maintenance is completed with absolutely no outage to the business IT system – one of the major benefits for Lufthansa Cargo. This unique capability results in operational stability, which is essential to fulfill the customer promise and to provide effective and seamless cargo handling operations around the clock across all time zones without any service disruptions.

Lufthansa Cargo will also benefit from superior and faster application performance of highly complex cargo business functions and processes. As an example, Lufthansa Cargo processes one million messages per day. Each message will now be processed noticeably faster than before in less than one second on the IBS Software SaaS platform.

The initial performance of the system, which operates from IBS Software’s new data centre in Frankfurt, has shown that the SaaS service has exceeded the benchmarks in all parameters set by Lufthansa Cargo, with 100 percent service-level agreement (SLA) compliance.

Lufthansa Cargo CIO Jochen Göttelmann said, “IBS Software has consistently delivered beyond expectations throughout our relationship that started with the iCAP implementation. They have demonstrated their capability to take on the established leaders in application hosting and offer a true SaaS provisioning that helps us to focus on our core competencies. We greatly value the responsibility and commitment that IBS Software brings to the table.”

“IBS Software is thrilled to sign up Lufthansa Cargo as a SaaS customer, benefitting from our industry-leading iCargo platform hosted in our world-class data centres. Lufthansa Cargo’s selection of IBS Software is testament to our excellent track record of iCAP delivery for the past seven years, and our commitment to consistently deliver value to our customers”, said Ashok Rajan, SVP & head of airline cargo services, IBS Software.

On March 5, the SaaS solution provider announced a contract with Japan Airlines (JAL) for the implementation of iCargo. JAL plans to replace multiple legacy systems with IBS’s iCargo Terminal Operations solution for Japan, the workhorse that will manage the entire operations process covering the import, export, transfers, warehouse operations and airport operations across the network.

Recently at the air cargo India 2020, IBS has been awarded the ‘International IT Systems Provider of the Year’ by The STAT Trade Times.