United Airlines Uses BEA Platform to Integrate Its Operations and Improve Customer Service
Global Airline Relies on BEA Software to Help Ensure 99.999 Percent System Uptime and Deliver Personalized Information to Millions of Customers and Staff
SAN JOSE, Calif., Jul 30, 2001 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- BEA Systems, Inc. (Nasdaq: BEAS chart, msgs), one of the world's leading e-business infrastructure software companies, today announced that United Airlines (NYSE: UAL chart, msgs) is using BEA WebLogic(R) Server and BEA Tuxedo(R) to streamline the data flow throughout its entire organization by integrating the airline's fleet management, operations, planning, reservation and Mileage Plus(R) systems. In addition, United plans to use BEA WebLogic Personalization Server(TM) to customize the experiences of United travelers by helping ensure that preferences for travel times, seat placements, meals and other personal requests are available to United personnel at each step in the booking and traveling process.
Upon project completion, United anticipates that its built-on-BEA infrastructure will support tens of thousands of concurrent users and thousands of transactions per second. United's goal is to ensure 99.999 percent service uptime for its customers, exceeding the availability records of even the most reliable utilities. Such extreme scalability and uptime is critical to the success of one of the world's largest airlines -- United carries millions of passengers annually and offers nearly 2,300 flights a day to 130 destinations in 27 countries and two U.S. territories.
"Information is at the heart of everything we do at United," said Denny Lyons, manager of architecture and technology at United Airlines. "Customers, ground crews, gate attendants, flight crews, reservations agents, operations staff and the management team need access to critical, time-sensitive data customized to each of their unique needs. BEA is helping us ensure that the right information gets to the appropriate people when they need it. Technological innovation helped make United a great airline and it's a key to our continued success."
Every event at United sets in motion a chain reaction. For example, a plane touching down at Chicago O'Hare International Airport sparks a flurry of activity by United's baggage handlers, gate attendants, connecting passengers and ticketing agents for the flight's next leg. By building on the BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform(TM), United can integrate and coordinate the flow of information so that every person affected by the flight's arrival takes the appropriate actions as efficiently as possible.
BEA Infrastructure Future-Proofs United's Past and Future IT Investments
United is leveraging key components of the BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform to integrate all of its core systems, from the front-end to the back-end. BEA Tuxedo is United's transaction-processing platform, which integrates with the airline's previous generation of mainframe systems and large, legacy databases. BEA WebLogic Server(TM) is United's new foundation for Web applications. BEA software supports a variety of standards-based technologies, such as Enterprise JavaBeans and the Common Object Request Broker Architecture, to give IT staff development choices and ensure they can bring new capabilities online rapidly and integrate them easily into the larger United infrastructure. United also is using BEA eLink(TM) to integrate disparate systems, and BEA Jolt(R) to Internet-enable BEA Tuxedo's distributed transaction processing. United now is well on its way to fully integrating its complex, diversified applications, and providing access to these applications via Web-based interfaces, telephone-based voice-response units, and television monitors and computers inside airport terminals.
"BEA considers our relationship with United Airlines to be a partnership, and our role is to help United operate as effectively as possible while maximizing the return on the considerable technology investments the airline has already made," said John Kiger, director of product marketing for BEA E-Commerce Server Division. "The BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform is helping airline employees and business planners do their jobs smarter, faster and better. It's helping improve the travel experience for United's customers, and at the same time extending the useful life of legacy systems while enabling the airline to embrace powerful, new Web capabilities |
