TIBCO was selected basically because of its resiliency, robustness, and of course the good references that we received during the selection process.
Juan Carlos Ferrer, Director of Enterprise Architecture LATAM Airlines Group
How LATAM Airlines Used TIBCO to Make Its Connection
Merging Airline Companies with TIBCO Integration
Challenge
Real-time computing is part of almost everything an airline does, from coordinating departures and boarding passengers to managing inventory. With technology so deeply ingrained in business operations, mergers can create a serious migration problem. When LAN and TAM airlines merged, they faced the challenge of how to unify their processes and integrate their systems.
To appreciate what an undertaking it was to merge LAN and TAM’s computing, you must understand the depth of the duplication. “We have several processes, back-office processes, as well as operational and customer-facing processes, and for each of those we have systems that LAN and TAM needed to integrate,” explains Juan Carlos Ferrer, director of enterprise architecture for LATAM Airlines Group.
Combining these systems would be a challenge in and of itself, but the new company needed to do it without any major interruption to customer service. “We are very pressed on the one hand to accomplish the objective of merging both companies’ processes, and on the other hand, to keep up with what the customer is expecting in terms of the service,” says Ferrer.
Solution
LATAM decided the best course of action would be to introduce a service-oriented architecture (SOA) that would allow deeply embedded legacy systems to interact
with newer systems that could be more easily changed. It also meant a simpler and shorter unification process, because they wouldn’t have to start from scratch. “Not only did we need good governance, but an infrastructure that guarantees us very high levels of resiliency and robustness, and one that would make sure this change would not impact the continuity of the business,” says Ferrer.
Starting with TIBCO ActiveMatrix® Service Bus as a mediation layer, LATAM uses TIBCO Enterprise Message Service™ to communicate between infrastructures and
systems new and old. In addition, TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™ is used as a platform for implementing new processes and propagating scheduled changes to legacy systems.
Benefits
Fast Integration and Faster Service Delivery
With TIBCO technologies, LATAM integrated and merged systems quickly while establishing a foundation for the future. Its SOA approach helped them connect several systems from all corners of the organization, and it even helped them deliver services faster. “With good SOA governance, with good definition of canonical entities, service interfaces, and business services, and by using TIBCO BusinessWorks, we were able to provide services with a very good time to market,” says Ferrer.
Future
Now that LATAM has established a source of events, it is weighing the value of big data and analytics. “That’s something we’re really looking forward to using in
the future. We believe that we might connect with the big data notion, the event processing concept as well. We’re waiting for the correct time to merge them into a solution,” said Ferrer.