BA selects Progress for IT system upgrade

Peter Dinham
Wednesday, 18 November 2009 06:43

IT Industry - Deals

The UK’s biggest airline, British Airways (BA) is to upgrade its entire IT system as part of its worldwide travel program by integrating over 600 electronic systems and processes using a portfolio of SOA solutions from Progress Software.

BA CTO, Gordon Penfold, said under the contract, the upgrade will extend to 2014, and that “with 300 locations around the globe, 25,000 users and more than 250 key applications, BA's goal is to transform the travel experience.”

According to Penfold, the flexibility of the Progress SOA portfolio “allows BA to extend the features of its e-commerce site right through to its airports, by allowing greater self-service functionality and 'plug and play' capability."

The result, according to Penfold, is to drive an agile business where rollout is easier, and cost and time is reduced. “The airport environment is complex and the systems are mission critical,” he added. “Moving this to a highly automated environment is a challenge, but SOA quickly proved itself to be the right approach to achieving our goal of a fully agile environment.”

“The new SOA infrastructure is far more flexible and we are looking to roll out new services more quickly. At the same time, real-time data synchronisation means information quality is improved and costs are saved thanks to reduction in data replication.”

BA will initially use Progress Sonic ESB, Progress Actional SOA Management and Progress DataXtend Semantic Integrator from Progress’s portfolio of SOA applications, and Progress Software president and CEO, Rick Reidy, said “BA is taking its airline’s IT infrastructure and moving the goalposts. This is a critical time for the industry, and BA’s investment will give it a competitive advantage while other carriers are cutting back.”

“Looking ahead, a more flexible and integrated IT infrastructure means BA is well positioned to extend ba.com customer information, for example, into fully web-enabled passenger manifests.

According to Reidy, “modern air travel is dependent on more intelligent use of technology, and BA’s customers will be the first to benefit.”