While SOA, rightly or wrongly, is primarily seen as a strategy for optimizing IT operations, it's always good to see where it directly impacts the business.
In this month's Baseline Magazine, David Carr provides an interesting account of how service-oriented architecture did just that -- having a direct impact on a business's growth.
Carr talks about how Aeroplan, originally the frequent-flier plan for Air Canada, was able to expand its reach to both consumers and business partners in supporting customer loyalty rewards programs. Aeroplan's mainframe-based systems were originally built around supporting frequent-flier miles, until Air Canada spun the company off two years ago. Aeroplan sells mileage credits to 60 partners, including credit card issuers, and last year, issued 69.7 billion mileage credits and redeemed 49.3 billion, which were applied to airline tickets, hotel rooms, and merchandise.
Aeroplan's challenge was to expand its Its range of offerings beyond what was a limited number of flights on Air Canada routes.
Enter Web services, which helped Aeroplan integrate with partners to expand its program beyond airline seats. Aeroplan sought to increase the percentage of miles redeemed for non-flight rewards to 25% a year, up from 11% in 2006 and eight percent in 2005.
To meet this goal, Aeroplan wanted to still leverage the mainframe as a back-end transaction engine, but add service layers for interacting with business partners and consumers. Aeroplan employed XML Web servuces in conjunction with open-source technologies such as Linux, the Apache Web server and MySQL database.
Carr observes that "before creating the ability to tap into the systems of its partners via Web services, Aeroplan provided a way for partners to tap into its own services that way." Aeroplan also was making some use of XML exchange data between its mainframe and other applications, such as the Website and an interactive voice response system.
"Rather than rewrite those XML messages and disrupt the applications that already depended on
them, Aeroplan used the Reactivity appliance to automatically translate them into a standardized format for Web services transactions with partners. The appliance also translated between the IBM MQSeries protocol, used to transmit data between internal applications, and the Web-standard HTTPS protocol used for functions
such as credit card transactions."
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