Last month Scandinavian airline SAS
revealed
how it was implementing Tibco's enterprise service bus software to
link its legacy IT systems. The project aims to give the
airline a competitive advantage by helping it bring applications to
market more rapidly.
The firm is not alone.
AirFrance KLM,
British Airways, Delta and Korea Airlines are engaged in
similar projects with suppliers such as BEA and IBM. Their work
will provide valuable lessons for IT managers in other sectors
looking at these technologies.
The
concepts behind SOA are not new, said David Bradshaw, principal
analyst at Ovum. "SOA is not a radical departure, but the
continuation of something that has been going on for a long time,"
he said. In the past, firms had to create bespoke software to link
each application individually. Now they can link applications more
easily, using off-the-shelf technology based on open standards.
AirFrance KLM is adopting Tibco's enterprise service bus to help
it comply with SOA standards and aid integration with external IT
systems. However, it has been using SOA-like concepts for the past
decade. The initial aim was to create real-time dialogue between
applications. In the past, this was essentially a technical task,
using bespoke in-house middleware as an enterprise bus to manage
messages between applications.
Now, said Jean Christophe Lalanne, director of strategy service,
architecture and corporate technology at AirFrance, the airline can
use its experience to ease the integration of applications
following its merger with KLM. Using technology based on
open standards, it can do this without having to rewrite code
or create one-to-one application interfaces.
"As we got closer to KLM, it was impossible to envisage using an
in-house architecture, however effective, as we are going to share
70% of our information systems. The package nature of SOA lets us
concentrate on the business aspects of the projects, while we can
delegate the 'plumbing' to specialist software houses," said
Lalanne.
The main business driver for these application integration
projects is the need to become more responsive to flight delays
caused by changes in the weather and other unforeseen events, and
to minimise the knock-on effects of delays.
In the case of Delta Airlines, Tibco software automates data
sharing among its many databases and applications. When information
about a weather-related delay enters the Delta system, data passes
to the scheduling system and adjusts departure times for affected
flights.
Data is also displayed at arrival gates, where airline staff use
instrument panels to track information and manage events in real
time. The system sends information to other airports, where staff
can re-book missed connections in advance, improving customer
service.
Another driver for SOA in airlines has been competition from
budget airlines and the push to do more business online. BA has
created a standards-based architecture for developing, integrating,
securing and managing its distributed Java-based system as part of
a £30m transformation programme to make ba.com a central
distribution channel.
The airline is using
BEA Weblogic Server to co-ordinate multiple back-end systems
and related web portals. These include the Amadeus global airline
reservation system, the products and fare types offered by BA,
multiple customer databases, and kiosk/desk-based check-in systems.
Although not explicitly an SOA project, it relies on some of the
same technologies.
Despite the success of SOA-style technologies in the airline
industry, SOA is not a panacea, said Bradshaw. "There is still a
lot of difficult work to do," he said.
Because different applications define their data in various
ways, a major sticking point for large SOA projects is agreeing
definitions. "For example, if you are gathering data for the
purpose of customer relationship management, what is a customer?
Someone who visits your website? Books a flight? Pays a bill? Each
application might have a different definition. SOA technology does
not solve that problem," said Bradshaw.
Although SOA has become an accepted method of linking existing
applications to lower the cost or improve performance, Bradshaw
said it had yet to prove its ability to enable business process
re-engineering, as some suppliers suggest it can.
"The second stage of SOA is to give you flexibility about how
you configure business processes because reconfiguring applications
is relatively painless," he said. However, Bradshaw warned that
this application of SOA was still in its early stages and it was
too early to say how applicable the technology was to this
problem.
Service orientated
architecture >>
SOA toolbox >>
Scandinavian airline
SAS >>
British Airways: information >>
Delta Airlines
>>
Comment on this article:
computer.weekly@rbi.co.uk