In the last three years, UAL has put together a thin client-basedarchitecture, successfully. As it was developed for internal use, thenext step was to build it for external customers. "Customers arebecoming more Web-savvy, and technologies, more feasible. We needed totranslate this architecture into something that is more available forcustomers. Loyalty services, for instance, took this architecture as abasis," says Robless. UAL developed a reference model called "e-travelconcourse" and built its architecture on top of this reference model.BEA provided the application infrastructure through WebLogic, whileVignette provided the content management system that ensures theinformation presented to customers across different touchpoints wasconsistent.

"E-travel concourse" consists of an airport terminal with a storefrontutility underneath. The storefront holds the united.com site andmobile sites. In future, UAL plans to introduce more services, such asairport and phone reservation systems and services for Star Alliancepartners and travel agents, says Robless. "The goal is to have allthese portals or storefronts receive the same type of information andcomputing logic that serve all our systems," he says. These portalsare served through engines built separately for booking tickets,changing itineraries once the tickets are bought, or serving outinformation proactively or on demand. There's also a contentmanagement engine that serves standard words, pictures and ways toreach out in a consistent manner. "These are common services, and wedon't want to have to rebuild them for every portal that we have," headds.