Striking the balance: Providing flexible tech cost-effectively

At Trainline, we’re passionate about promoting greener travel choices. Every time we attract someone to rail, and successfully encourage them to take the train rather than fly or drive, we know their decision has made a small difference to the future of our planet. Our overarching vision is to be the world’s number one rail platform, so that we can make these individual differences hundreds of millions of times over, and on a scale where that change has a meaningful impact.

To achieve this, we have spent years developing our core technology platform, which powers the everyday booking and ticketing experience of our customers. This platform has immense scope, bringing together millions of fare and journey options from more than 270 rail and coach carriers, spanning 45 countries.

Our core technology platform also caters for the diverse needs of a range of businesses – a number of UK train operators; a wide variety of specialist Travel Management Companies, and the Online Booking Tools that support the business travel sector; and thousands of individual businesses who book directly through Trainline. Plus of course, it powers our hugely successful app and website that retails millions of journeys direct to UK passengers.

Each of these users has their own business model, brand, and specialist requirements from our technology, and wants to ensure the service we provide is finetuned for their own operations.

So how do we provide that flexibility and tailored approach, while making our technology cost-effective and easy to access?

And how do we ensure that we are the ones doing the legwork, so our customers can focus their time and budget on developing their individual proposition, safe in the knowledge that our team will take care of the rest?

It’s a conundrum, but we’ve spent the past 20 years perfecting our answer.

Step One: Delivering core technology cost-effectively

The first part of our answer is ensuring the core technology that powers our platform is reliable, scalable and secure so that it can meet the needs of our different customers cost-effectively and flexibly.

Each individual customer we supply will have different priorities when it comes to payment methods, their purchase flow, and the features they offer to their own customers. It is possible to build these bespoke components from scratch – but this is both expensive and time-consuming, which means it is rarely the right answer for any business.

However, while their combination of features may be unique, many of the individual components will be common to other users too. So, we take advantage of this by building chosen, relevant core capability just once – then making it available to all or multiple customers of our platform, as appropriate.

This is all made possible by housing our technology on “multi-tenanted architecture”. Simply put, all our customers sit on one platform that is hosted on public cloud infrastructure and managed by us.

Each of our business customers, including the Trainline app and website, is a “tenant” on this technology platform. They have access to, and configuration of, specific products and features that are available within the platform. We manage this with logical separation between different tenants.

An advantage of this option is that it reduces the operational complexity involved in developing and maintaining our technology. This is important because it reduces our development costs and, in turn, our customers’ overheads. Furthermore, if capability is shared across tenants, so is the cost of development, meaning that customers often only have to pay a share of that cost.

Overall, this results in a much lower “total cost of ownership” (TCO), when compared with building new technology from scratch – particularly when you consider the scope and complexity of the functionality that we provide.

There are a host of other advantages to our model too. New customers can be brought to market quickly and at low cost, as all the core functionality already exists in our sophisticated base of technology.

And as it reduces the operational complexity of our technology platform, our expert team can spend more time concentrating on other universal benefits to tenants like ensuring the platform is fully stable, secure, and scalable.

Step Two: Providing capacity for customer autonomy

Having neatly solved the first part of the conundrum – delivering reliable, scalable core technology at pace and cost-effectively – the second part of our challenge is to ensure our customers have flexibility and autonomy over their front-end passenger experience and the evolution of their individual product.

These business aspirations require bespoke products and roadmaps, and often involve strict commercial sensitivity. There are resource implications too - no customer wants to be stuck in a queue, unable to progress because another client’s project has taken priority.

We achieve this through the structure of our tech teams (shown below). We have established several independent “vertical” teams, each aligned to their own distinct, defined business objectives and driven by the customers who are being served by that vertical. Vertical resource is exclusively allocated to the development of customer-specific capabilities, feature extensions, or evolution of individual customers’ passenger experience.

Supporting these verticals are our platform team, who are responsible for overall health, stability and quality control for the technology platform. Importantly, this team are truly customer-agnostic – their work benefits all customers, delivering on a universal roadmap and continually improving the capability of our core technology platform.

As a result, we can resource both the universal elements of our platform, and the optional bespoke needs of individual customers. Our customers can continuously evolve their own product, while benefitting from access to a continually improving core platform of capability.

We really believe our model offers our customers the best of both worlds – and it means that together we can help save the planet, millions of journeys at a time.