SOA Gains Altitude at United

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June 07, 2007

SOA Gains Altitude at United

Some industry observers have equated service-enabling formerly proprietary legacy applications to "putting lipstick on a pig," and this serves, at best, as a temporary solution until a full-fledged SOA environment is put into place.

I think some legacy systems, such as mainframes and System i, can be full-functioning citizens of an SOA community, but I digress.

United Airlines, which reportedly has been working on service-enabling its back-end systems since 2001, decided that the time had come to take the next step with its previously service-enabled mainframes to move to an even more open-standards-based middleware architecture. "We are in the infancy stage," said Ramnath Cidambi, manager of middleware engineering and support services at United Airlines. "We are taking the next steps to SOA."

Elliot King recently spoke with Cidambi about United's challenge in the latest issue of BPM Strategies. Over the years, United had built an extensive J2EE-based middleware layer to integrate its large assortment of IBM and Unisys mainframes.

Cidambi's team set out to migrate its flight information system from legacy-based SOA to a publish/subscribe model. "Airline operations are completely event-oriented -- as events occur, their impact ripples throughout the entire system and beyond," Cidambi explained.

The main thrust was development of an SOA-enabled system called EasyFIDS, which is a flight information system to track the current status of flights, Elliot reports. EasyFIDs is able to relay information about flight status, in real time, to multiple endpoints, including airport monitors, crews at different airports, the Federal Aviation Administration, and most importantly, passengers themselves, who may or may not already have checked in. This calls for a system capable of communicating with a variety of endpoints.

Currently, United has about 22 SOA-enabled mission-critical applications in production as part of EasyFIDS, Elliot reports. If bad weather blows in after an airplane has already pulled onto the tarmac, for instance, the publish/subscribe application is used to communicate with the new priority for take-off.

While United has been able to put these new applications to work, the challenge continues to be a need for more standardization been applications from all industries, Cidambi said. For example, the airlines need to interact better with partners in the hospitality and travel industries. In addition, he noted, J2EE application servers may have been standardized, but this is not the case with Enterprise Service Buses, where every vendor has its own flavor.

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