Transaction processing company futureproofs its infrastructure by migrating to SOA

Every day, tens of thousands of offline and online travel agencies depend on this transaction processing company’s products and services. The company collects inventory and other data from airlines, hotels, car rental agencies and rail and cruise lines, and distributes that information to its customers. This breadth of information enables travel agencies to create a more pleasant travel experience for their customers while taking advantage of new revenue opportunities.

Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the travel and transportation industry has undergone significant changes. Increased safety regulations and a slow economy have changed the way business is conducted. Airlines, for example, continually optimize their reservation solutions to create additional revenue opportunities such as charging customers for luggage.

In order to survive within this morphing environment, the company must be able to quickly build and deliver the services its customers request. To remain competitive, it must also anticipate customers’ needs and improve customer service offerings accordingly. To that end, the company sought to deliver a collaborative travel mechanism and a rich experience that embodies the entire journey—not just air travel. For example, it wanted to deliver a corporate booking tool that would allow employees traveling to the same conference to share ground transportation and coordinate dinner reservations so that they could all meet at the same restaurant.

The transaction processing services provider recognized that in order to be agile and improve its offerings, it needed to modernize—and futureproof—its infrastructure. “The direction we defined today is probably going to change. We needed a flexible business framework that was also consistent. I didn’t want to have 52 different vendor products to integrate our infrastructure,” says a senior vice president and chief information officer for the company.

The provider turned to IBM for its suite of products and expertise. “IBM’s products have been developed over many years, so they integrate and work well. Plus, IBM could bring in the skill sets to ensure a successful project,” says the SVP and CIO. IBM WebSphere provides a complete framework to enable the company to modernize its infrastructure and reach the next level of business success. The company lacked the resources to have the subject-matter experts in the respective disciplines, but IBM was a trusted business partner that could provide the necessary expertise.

“As a business, you have to invest in your future. Successful businesses don’t stand still. For us, the IBM WebSphere solution hit the mark for where we need to be to get to the future,” says the SVP and CIO.

Z/TPF OS sets the foundation
“The cornerstone of the solution is the z/TPF OS. The performance, availability and development environment allowed us to modernize in a number of ways,” says the SVP and CIO. z/Transaction Processing Facility Enterprise Edition is a high-performance operating system specifically designed to provide high availability for demanding, high-volume, real-time transaction processing. It enabled the company to transform its current solution from a 32-bit to a 64-bit architecture. “The implication there is that we can get more data closer to the CPU so that we can operate more effectively. We don’t have to seek time at a disk, therefore making the experience very fast when it’s inside the computer,” says the SVP and CIO. The z/TPF can process tens of thousands of transactions per second from hundreds of thousands of end users while maintaining a fast and consistent response time.

z/TPF also allows the company’s developers to operate in Java™, C, C++ and Java 2, Enterprise Edition technologies with modern tools that come along with those software languages. “We can therefore have services such as rules engines that are materially different than the complex set of things that we do today,” says the SVP and CIO.

WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus provides integration
The operating system upgrade also enabled the transaction processing company to put its services on the IBM WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus (ESB), which enables consistent and common communication. “WebSphere Enterprise Service Bus gives us a flexible connectivity infrastructure for integrating our applications and services. The services are loosely coupled and remain independent of each other, which improves maintenance, change control and management of those services,” says the SVP and CIO. The IT organization can add functions more easily because they have a consistent, documented communication mechanism. A lot of the new functions are self-identifiable so when they are plugged in, they automatically enter themselves into the registration profile and come online to the user.

WebSphere MQ futureproofs the solution
WebSphere MQ forms the backbone of the company’s communications systems and is entrusted with delivering business-critical and high-value data. It serves as the messaging backbone for deploying ESB as the connectivity layer of a service oriented architecture. “WebSphere MQ enables us to manage our current technology more effectively, but more importantly, it provides us a clear path to the future,” says the SVP and CIO. Now his team can develop and deploy new applications faster and more cost-effectively because there is no need to write complex communications code.

WebSphere Message Broker allows data to be leveraged across applications
WebSphere Message Broker serves as a platform-neutral ESB that is built for universal connectivity and transformation in heterogeneous IT environments. By enabling the abstraction of data away from protocol and transport specifics, Message Broker allows the business to separate information distribution from the actual business logic that governs that distribution. This capability, in turn, makes the data centrally available within the ESB so that the company can develop new, value-added services that use its critical data. Through this abstraction, the transaction processing company has the flexibility to introduce new services without having to change existing application code to realize the benefits of those new services.

solidDB delivers data when its needed
The company’s WebSphere solution is supported by solidDB. The relational in-memory database delivers extreme speed because it keeps data in memory at all times rather than on disk. Applications can achieve throughput of tens-to-hundreds of thousands of transactions per second with response times measured in microseconds, also providing applications extreme data availability with sub-second failover. This performance and availability ensures that each of the company’s customers get consistently high-quality service.

Benefits extend beyond customers
“The WebSphere solution enables the company to be agile and more efficient, in turn enabling us to present our marketplace with more products faster than our competition,” says the SVP and CIO. The company is soliciting the needs of travel agencies, corporations using booking tools and the Open Travel Alliance. With a modernized infrastructure, the company can respond to these needs and provide a richer user experience for those agents.

The transaction processing company is also taking advantage of a forward-thinking solution that enables its customers to improve their customer service. Services are no longer developed based on the transportation to a destination, but as a suite of services for a journey. For example, the use of preferencing engines helps determine the purpose of a traveler’s trip and offers additional assets such as entertainment and restaurant options accordingly. “We are using data analytics to bring together the appropriate content that will help enrich the end-user’s journey,” says the SVP and CIO.

The company’s customers are happier with the services offered, and so are their end users, making the migration project a success. “The success factor is our ability to bring high-quality products to market that have great end-user acceptance. It’s very important that we focus on our customers’ customers and their use of the product. We’re able to do that better now, and our customers are happier with us for it,” says the SVP and CIO.

For more information
Please contact your local IBM sales representative or visit:
ibm.com/websphere