Global travel company

In fall 2006, the company implemented the IBM® WebSphere® DataPower Integration Appliance XI50 into their environment and migrated to a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The DataPower XI50 appliances were deployed in their network as secure web servers. In parallel, another key objective of the company’s appliance strategy was to manage data integration services to handle trading partner requests and routing through the DataPower XI50. One of the key components driving their business success is the application of technology to enhance ways to quickly, cost effectively and easily expand their partner networks.

With expected growth in the customer base and associated messaging traffic in the range of two orders of magnitude, the company could not economically replicate the existing application servers to handle the load. A large portion of the translation, transformation, authentication and authorization needed to be moved to another layer of their architecture. The business looked to the combined power of the DataPower X150 and OpenText Contivo to innovatively address this need.

Simplifying integration was a strategic objective. The travel company needed to replace their monolithic processing and eliminate their expensive hand coding process. By implementing data integration design with Contivo’s transformation design solution, the company was able to deploy an SOA architecture that provided a cost-effective, componentized and easy to deploy run-time design, bolstered by a robust and flexible design environment that allows unlimited partner expansion.

The goals of the transformation included:

• An efficient, cost-effective, componentized solution that offered the ability “scale as you go”
• Support for both binary and XML files to accommodate the partner network comprised of messages in all formats, from XML to EDIFACT to Copybooks
• The ability to handle flexible manipulation and mapping of rules that could easily be uploaded to the DataPower XI50 appliance
• The capability to go beyond simple mapping and allow the use of the text rule and looping editor to define complex translation of one set of semantic representations to another

Before DataPower XI50 and Contivo, the company had limited mapping capability that was implemented entirely in C# on their application servers. In the new SOA environment, this has been simplified and offloaded to Contivo and the DataPower XI50 appliances. All new interfaces are built and executed using the Contivo and DataPower XI50 combination.

This environment does not rely on an enterprise service bus (ESB) for this purpose. Instead, the company innovatively uses Contivo’s data transformation design tool to provide intelligence to the DataPower XI50 appliance for accomplishing routing and distributed deployment of service requests.

The successful SOA deployment led to plans to add additional DataPower XI50 appliances and Contivo licenses to support the company’s growth model and expansion of its successful partner networks.