Every day, UK National Rail Enquiries serves 1.3 million passenger enquiries. Train Travel uses Windows Phone 7’s Silverlight and Live Tile capabilities to provide users with an intuitive interface that makes their travel easier. Travellers will be able to plan trips in advance, check live station departures and receive real time notifications of service disruption or delays to their journey.
“We’re in the business of providing people with the most up to date information to help get them from A to B as quickly and easily as possible,” said Chris Scoggins, chief executive of National Rail Enquiries. “We are pleased to work with Avanade and to help ever greater numbers of people benefit from high quality rail information services.”
Remarked Aziz Virani, executive vice president, Global Technologies and Solutions at Avanade: “The Train Travel application is just one more example of how Avanade is innovating on Microsoft technologies and successfully delivering mobile solutions to our enterprise customers. Avanade has delivered enterprise mobile solutions on the Microsoft platform for 10 years and as these platforms have evolved so too have our capabilities.”
Avanade’s focus has been on mobile solutions for the field workers on rugged or durable devices based on the Windows Phone platform. The company is now also meeting the increasing demand to deliver solutions for businesses and consumers with a richer user experience and intuitive interfaces that are less transactional, but still integrate with back office systems such as customer relationship management (CRM) and cloud services such as those used by National Rail.
“Mobility is changing the face of how customers communicate and consume information,” said Charlie Kindel, general manager, mobile developer ecosystem at Microsoft. “Microsoft and Avanade’s successful partnership on this advanced mobile solution has demonstrated our collective capability to deliver real business value to both enterprise customers and consumers on a global level.”
As a premier global partner, Avanade will continue to work with the Microsoft product development team to deliver mobile applications to its customers. The Train Travel application is just one step in building momentum in the mobile industry, and will be part of a set of showcase applications built for Windows Phone 7.
Steve Butcher, senior consultant at Avanade, commented: “The Windows Phone 7 handsets are the perfect choice for those users out there that want a business phone, but with a consumer interface. Orange is already seeing an overwhelming demand for the handsets now available, with sales on track to match the resounding success seen by Apple’s iPhone.
“Microsoft has listened to its users and developers out there and created a central means for gadget lovers to merge their work and play habits. The ‘hub’ philosophy that Microsoft has worked into the Windows Phone 7 platform, making all applications, recent documents and SharePoint 2010 accessible on the go, even if you are out of signal range, is invaluable to the business user who needs to dip into work life out of the office. The embedded Silverlight technology and ‘Live Tile’ capabilities of the Windows Phone 7 platform make for a much more intuitive interface than other devices on the market.”