Flying the integrated skies

For UAL, the road to integration began six years ago when itstandardised on BEA's Tuxedo Server as its integration platform. Sincethen, new technologies such as CORBA (Common Object Request BrokerArchitecture) have emerged to compete with Tuxedo. However, UAL heldoff from moving into CORBA, taking the chance with a newer technologyonly when Java and the application server were launched. Says UAL'smanager of architecture technology Denny Lyons: "So far, we've beensuccessful in tying all our backend systems together and having themcommunicate back and forth."

This was not the case three years ago when UAL faced its most seriousIS challenge in its 75-year history: to design a new architecture forits entire IT infrastructure. UAL had a host of legacy systems dealingwith safety, selling tickets, getting information about flights andoperations, and more recently, understanding its customers. Most ofthese systems were built 50 years ago and were inflexible. "They didwhat they were built to do, and coupled with that, all the companiesthat dealt with travel had the same inflexible, difficult-to-adaptsystems. But they ran the airline very well, as they were stable andextremely fast," says Robert Robless, chief technology officer of UAL.These systems, including Apollo (a global distribution system) andCosmo (for getting spare parts to where they need to be), are one-tiersystems built in silos. For instance, the reservation system wouldonly do reservations, and the mileage plus system would only deal withloyalty and frequent flyer information. For some of these systems, UALeven had to train its own programmers in languages such asFortran.

In the early days, UAL attempted to share information internally byputting its systems on multiple terminals. This was inefficient sinceusers had to go to different terminals to get the right data. In orderto drive economy into its systems and get payback from them, in the1980s, UAL installed networks to share data between these systems.Information was, however, never really tied together as differentscreens were used to show information from different systems. Besidesbuilding up specialised networks, that era also saw UAL spending lesson huge mainframes and more on getting greater functionality out ofsmaller machines.

In the 1990s, travel became a commodity, and travellers demanded lesshassle. IP technology also became more prevalent, allowing differentnetworks to be connected, and data to be transferred. "We had theability to make information much more readable from the users'standpoint, as we didn't have to train service agents as heavily. Thecost of delivering that [information] service was drilled downdramatically," says Robless.