Massive Rocket & OAG.
OAG & Massive Rocket Customer Story
Unlocking Smarter Travel: How OAG Empowers the Industry
OAG is the global leader in travel data, driving innovation and growth across the air travel ecosystem since 1929. They provide a unique platform offering seamless access to the world’s most extensive network of flight information. This empowers businesses with the insights they need to make smarter decisions, optimize operations, and create exceptional customer experiences throughout the entire travel journey. From planning to execution, OAG’s data empowers a diverse range of clients including airlines, airports, travel agencies, and financial institutions to unlock new revenue streams, improve efficiency, and build stronger customer relationships.
Customers
250+ Airlines
300+ Airports
Products
Data
Insight
Display
The Challenge
Presentation Products and the Flightview mobile application are two high scale user facing touchpoints that the OAG team use to display the flight status data that is core to their business. These interfaces had been built over a number of different years but a number of different teams which presented the OAG team a number of different challenges in terms of client retention as well as ongoing operational support and maintenance.
Efficiency Bottlenecks
OAG’s software development process, while functional, had become less efficient over time. Managing the codebase and deploying changes relied heavily on manual processes. This meant even small updates or bug fixes required significant effort from the development team. Additionally, the outdated frameworks used presented security vulnerabilities and made integrating with newer technologies challenging. OAG recognized the need for a more streamlined approach to development and deployment to deliver changes faster and minimize errors.
User Experience Gap
The user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) of OAG’s platform, while functional, lacked the modern design elements that users were increasingly expecting. This dated look and feel presented a challenge in attracting new customers. Even though OAG offered industry-leading data, some customers were drawn to competitor platforms with a more modern user experience. OAG understood the need for a UI/UX refresh that better reflected the value and power of their data.
A Need for Modernization
By addressing these challenges, OAG aimed to achieve a more efficient development process, reduce the risk of errors, and ultimately deliver a more user-friendly experience for their customers. This would allow them to focus on their core strength: providing the travel industry with the most comprehensive and valuable data available.
The Solution
Team Extension
Massive Rocket became an extension of OAG’s existing development teams based in the UK and Lithuania. Massive Rocket set about taking ownership of a full suite of products, learning the intricacies of these products with minimal documentation whilst collaborating with teams across the business to ensure the success of this partnership.
Key skills provided
- Agile Project Management
- UX & UI Design
- Web Development (.net, react)
- Mobile Development (native iOs & Android)
- Devops
- QA
Our Approach
Audit, Discovery & Setup
With an immediate need to take ownership of 10+ web based products and mobile applications, the team at Massive Rocket ran an initial audit of the technology landscape as well as a number of workshops to identify goals, ways of working, potential risks and dependencies. As part of the project setup, the team put in place regular communication to ensure key stakeholder involvement and updates. The team then build out a backlog, established ways of working, designed escalation paths and started knowledge gathering sessions.
Stabilisation
Massive Rocket’s first objective was to minimize disruptions and ensure requests from new and existing clients were delivered swiftly and to the high standards expected. While addressing this, the team built out a clean backlog, roadmap and outlined coding and deploy processes.
Review and acceleration
Once status quo had been achieved, evaluation began into opportunities for optimizations, including devops efficiencies, product enhancements, process improvements and observability.
Massive Rocket have become the Mobile (and front-end) extension to the OAG engineering team. Their niche skills and expertise have helped us accelerate our growth on mobile.
Caroline Mather
Marketing Director
OAG
The Results
Streamlined Deployments
Gone are the days of zip files manually uploaded to a FTP server for release and rollback deployments. Massive Rocket automated these processes, eliminating the need for manual file creation and deployments. This translates to deployments happening in minutes, compared to days previously.
Enhanced Presentation Products
OAG’s front-end presentation products previously faced limitations with older servers. Massive Rocket tackled this by rewriting the front-end using ReactJS, Mapbox, and Javascript. This modern approach enables real-time updates and a smoother user experience.
Revamped Routemapper
The Routemapper application, built with an outdated version of AngularJS, received a refresh. Massive Rocket rewrote it in React, resulting in a cleaner codebase, a more modern user interface, and easier maintenance for OAG.
Empowering Sales with a Demo Portal
Previously, OAG’s sales team relied on sharing individual links with potential customers. We built a dedicated demo portal for them. This platform not only helps the sales team understand the product better for clear communication, but also allows for customization and client-specific demos during the sales cycle.
Seamless Migrations
The 2020 Flash sunset posed a challenge. Massive Rocket automated the migration of Air Traffic Live components from Flash to HTML, ensuring continued functionality. Additionally, we helped OAG migrate all their customers to a modern Mapbox implementation, delivering a superior user experience and simplifying future updates.
OAG Flights, a customer portal for flight and travel information, was built using outdated technology. We migrated it to a more modern framework, ensuring long-term sustainability.
A Strategic Partnership
Massive Rocket has been a proud partner to OAG for nearly five years. Our collaboration reached new heights during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite the significant industry challenges impacting OAG’s business model, our teams persevered and supported each other. This shared experience strengthened our partnership, and we emerged stronger together.
How can we help?
You can also write to us at info@massiverocket.com