Eton, UK— 7th September 2010—  Leading European transport group Arriva plc has announced that its new m-Ticketing service has already seen over 300,000 journeys made by customers using their mobile phones to buy their bus tickets in the first six months of operation.  The m-Ticketing platform design is the work of mobile phone applications developer company, Concept Design Technologies (CDT), built on the InterSystems Caché® high performance object database.

As part of its continued drive to adopt new customer-focused technologies, Arriva launched a service that enabled customers to download a free mobile application to buy daily, weekly and 4-Weekly saver tickets via their mobile device.

The successful deployment of the payment solution on 4,500 buses on over 1,000 routes nationwide (excluding London), makes the system one of the largest deployments of its kind in the world. CDT's mobile application provides passengers with tickets delivered conveniently, quickly and securely to 90% of the UK's mobile devices.

Commenting on the challenges faced in delivering this project, CDT Managing Director Larry Breen said, "Key to this solution is being able to provide information quickly, irrespective of how powerful the mobile device actually is. We needed to be able to transmit small quantities of data very quickly and give the illusion of broadband speed information to mobile phones. Caché gave us the technology to do this because it provided us with a back-end that's lightning fast with very low latency."

Alongside the convenience experienced by customers, the information garnered via the application provides Arriva with a better understanding of customer needs and passenger purchasing patterns.  m-Ticketing provides the company with a direct one-to-one relationship with customers, therefore providing a rich scope for the cross-selling of products, as well as offering value-added services.

Arriva Marketing Manager Mike Woodhouse explained, "Mobile purchasing is the future for travel companies. We are delighted that we have made such quick progress in such a short space of time, moving from the pilot stage to nationwide roll-out within 6 months – and are now reaping the rewards."

This scalability is attributable to the Caché object database, which allows efficient and compact storage of data in a rich structure.

InterSystems' Sales Manager Chris Norton added, "InterSystems Caché is utilised by software developers like CDT because it enables rapid Web application development with minimal maintenance and hardware requirements – creating highly scalable solutions for end-users such as Arriva.  We are very proud to be an integral part of such an inventive and successful project."

The m-Ticketing platform won the category for most “Effective Use of Mobile Ticketing”, awarded at the 2010 Global Mobile Messaging Awards, a joint entry by Arriva, CDT and mobile transaction network partner, mBlox.[/color]