Lessons from the SOA high flyers - 6/8/2007. 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. EDS Tunes SOA, Cloud for Continental Airlines Operations.
EDS will combine SOA and cloud services to help Continental Airlines automate some flight operations and save money.
The solution, to be delivered as a software-as-a-service (SaaS), will leverage EDS' Airline SOA platform. by Vance McCarthy Tags: Flight, EDS, Flight Planning, Route, SaaS, Cost, Automate, Gordon Penfold, British Airways. About the company The airline industry is undergoing a services revolution.
Having once considered their proprietary systems and processes as core to their business, airline carriers increasingly rely on shared services providers such as the Amadeus IT Group, which processes over three million flight bookings a day. Airlines are also now highly dependent on their alliance partners, leveraging one another’s flight networks to provide as broad a range of services to customers as possible. This means that systems must integrate freely and easily, which explains why many carriers in the industry are turning to service-oriented architecture (SOA), the IT infrastructure design pattern in which application functionality is broken down into component ‘services’ – integrated via an enterprise service bus (ESB) – that can be quickly recombined to form new composite applications.
British Airways is one such carrier. Page 4 - Can Information Technology Save the Airlines? - Case Studies. : A Tech Strategy"> A Tech Strategy Of all the mainline domestic carriers, Alaska has been the most bullish on technology—and results seem to indicate that its strategy is paying off.
Alaska says that about a third of its revenue comes from its Web site, compared to more than 60 percent for discounters such as Southwest and JetBlue, but just 15 percent, or so, for large airlines such as Delta and American. Thanks primarily to Web ticketing and stingier policies regarding travel agency commissions, Alaska, which is headquartered in its hub city of Seattle, has shaved off about $60 million in distribution and selling expenses since late 2001. Where Is That Passenger? Some possible examples of detail level PNR, tickets, and flown data captured and derived are presented in the table below.
For example, a passenger departs on an earlier flight (#1) on the airline and consequently is not traveling on their original itinerary so in the aggregate is typically counted as a no show on the original flight (#2). Another passenger's itinerary was on the earlier flight (#1), but he did not show. Therefore the aggregate counts at the flight level showed that the earlier flight (#1) had zero no shows, but the later flight (#2) had one no show. This scenario is represented in Figure 2. For More Information. Chasing the Aftermarket. 2011 SITA/ATW Passenger Self-Service Survey. Industry-specific clouds come rolling in. By Esther Shein October 3, 2011 06:00 AM ET Computerworld - We've heard of private clouds, hybrid clouds, turnkey clouds -- now get ready for industry-specific clouds.
The idea is to provide technology, business processes and services uniquely tailored to the needs of a particular vertical. So far, one cloud offering for airlines and two for financial institutions have been announced, and industry watchers expect even more to emerge. While the cloud can be attractive for reasons including cost savings and agility, its value becomes even greater when providers can wrap vertical expertise and intellectual property around their offerings, observers say. An industry-specific cloud can be thought of as a private, hybrid cloud. "There are a host of solutions and platforms and hubs that are emerging at this industry-specific level," agrees Charlie Burns, vice president at research firm Saugatuck Technology. Industry-specific clouds, he maintains, are "the future. Flying into the cloud. Club del BPM para la difusión, formación e intercambio de experiencias sobre el BPM y los BPMS. Business challenge Service customers 24x7 anywhere in the world and make it as easy as possible for them to do business with the airline.
Use Service-Oriented Architecture to enhance the end-to-end customer experience by simplifying booking and check-in procedures as well as supplying other travel information to empower the passenger. Solution Deployed BEA WebLogic Server to create a highly interactive, easy-to-use Web environment, with advanced functionality. Delivered new, innovative services based on the flexible platform to exceed customer expectations. Results Award-winning ba.com offers innovative and comprehensive services, from online check-in, seat assignment and local language support, to baggage bookings, redemption of frequent flyer points and notification of flight time changes. Customer brief British Airways is one of the world’s largest international airlines, carrying in the year to March 2007 more than 33 million passengers worldwide.
Airline reservations systems: can IT deliver? Cutover nightmare: The challenge of IT transitions. And Air India achieve an important milestone in AI's transformation programme. Date: 29 March 2011 Location: Mumbai Air India today announced that the first milestone in its modernization process had been completed with the double migration of Air India and Indian Airlines to SITA's Horizon Passenger Services System (PSS).
The merged airlines now operate as a single unified carrier, Air India, paving the way for entry into the Star Alliance in mid-2011. JAL needs to turn its attention to a new set of customers. The fall of JAL from its once dominant position in Asia is a tragic one.
So much of its problems stem from the failure to adapt to a changing global air travel market than its internal issues. As more agile regional players take on the role of using their home bases as connecting hubs, JAL will continue to face market erosion unless it drastically changes its business model from being “The Wings of Japan†to becoming a global 5th- and 6th-Freedom carrier. JAL’s restructuring plans were recently approved by the bankruptcy court. The bailout will be near USD $11 billion and the fifth time that the airline has been rescued in a decade.
Most of the restructuring plans are cost-focused and standard for the industry, and many say they go just a bit too far in scaling back. Scandinavian Airlines pilots SOA - Software - Insight. Case study The value of service oriented architecture (SOA) development, which builds online services around reusable and commonly available components, has been widely recognised, particularly amongst large businesses with significant collections of servers and applications.
For Scandinavian Airlines System (SAS), a steadily expanding role for SOA has extended the life of legacy systems and encouraged code reuse -- but has also forced the company to find new ways of managing the code bounty. SAS carried 38.6 million passengers in 2006, an increase of 6.3 percent over the previous year and a reflection of the airline's growing footprint, particularly along busy Europe-Asia routes. Reflecting its multinational structure, the airline operates from primary hubs in Copenhagen, Oslo, and Stockholm and services 82 destinations worldwide.
Although the company has stopped short of moving its entire IT environment to SOA, the paradigm has been used each time the team embarks upon a new project. 2009 Airline IT Trends Survey: Technology developments. Passengers using their mobile phones to check-in may be fairly thin on the ground today, but airlines are forecasting that people using this service will increase fivefold in the next three years and are gearing up to rapidly accelerate the availability of a whole range of mobile facilities, including check-in, to help their customers self-process their journey.
The growth and popularity of web and mobile services look set to overshadow kiosks as a check-in channel - indeed airlines in some regions that have yet to implement kiosks may simply leapfrog this evolutionary stage. However there is plenty of life left in the kiosk as a self-service channel, with an increasing number of airlines looking to evolve it further to provide other self-processing tools.
It is inevitable there will be a lag between provision and usage as the once-a-year holidaymakers catch up with the frequent flyers. Self Service Key. Airline Project Highlights Delta Between SOA and Virtualization - SOA in Action Blog. Lately, there's been an increasing amount of discussion around the delta between SOA and virtualization. Todd Biske (MomentumSI) talks about this growing convergence in one of his latest "Outside the Box" posts, observing that "SOA creates a need for more efficient resource allocation," which is the goal of virtualization as well.
In the good old days, when everything could be plopped on a single systems, such as a mainframe, "a wily mainframe operator can do quite a bit to make sure that everything still manages to get done within the processing window," Todd said. British Airways upgrades systems with SOA - Software.