Travel – JTB Global Marketing & Travel
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Leading Travel Company, JTB rapidly expands business with Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus
Seamless connection through the Fiorano ESB to travel agencies around the world used to sell excess inventory and increase revenue
The multiple autonomous software components that comprise the Fiorano SOA platform provide further performance improvements by avoiding the need for control or intervention by a process engine running on a central server."
Key Points of this Case Study (Enterprise Architect)
- B2B integration for various partner systems
- EDI data schema for travel industry
- Web Service stub on SSL transport
- Agility for implementation and on-the-fly changes
Customer Profile
JTB Corporation got its start in 1912 as Japan Tourist Bureau, an organization that was founded in cooperation between the government and the private sector to both promote and facilitate travelers from overseas. Almost a century later, the international travel division of JTB was spun off as its own company, JTB Global Marketing & Travel (JTBGMT). JTBGMT continues that mission using its expertise cultivated from this rich experience.
JTB now provides travel products such as tour packages, hotel rooms, airline tickets, or any type of MICE event such as business meetings, incentive tours, international conferences or other large scale events. JTBGMT's exclusive network of overseas offices and extensive network created by the 170 companies throughout the world that make up the JTB group allows for smooth, quick service anytime, anywhere.
Business Problem
In the past, the company had focused its marketing efforts on its own network of travel agencies and their domestic reseller partners.
Unsold Inventory:
JTB was providing a variety of travel products to a lot of travelers. During the Japanese economic slow-down they were faced with a problem of a huge number of products in stock remaining unsold.
Limited Distribution Network:
JTB management realized that growth in revenue was being limited due to its sole dependence on JTB shops and domestic reseller partners; this was adversely impacting profitability. Therefore, JTBGMT was given a new mandate, viz. to expand its network globally and start selling products through travel agencies abroad.
Legacy Applications and IT Systems:
The key for success of this new role was to set up an efficient IT system which enabled seamless connection between such foreign agencies' systems and existing JTB back-end systems. Automation of business processes related to travel product sales was a critical requirement to resolve time differences between Japan and foreign countries.
Solution
JTB wanted to expand its business by marketing travel products to overseas travel agencies; this required connecting JTB back-end systems with overseas travel agencies' systems to automate business processes such as inventory inquiry, reservation and cancellation.
Fiorano's standards-based Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) allows enterprises to draw on existing business logic residing anywhere within their application environments to quickly assemble efficient solutions for business problems. These features allow users to simply drag and drop pre-built components and create the business process on-the-fly, with zero-coding. Proven middleware capabilities allow Fiorano ESB to handle large scale message transfer with highly competitive performance numbers.
JTB GMT began an evaluation of different solutions; the company set the following goals for resolving its business problems:
- To achieve seamless integration of JTB's inventory system with foreign agencies' front-end systems which are mostly web-sites or e-commerce sites that serve as user interfaces to travelers.
- To define a common data schema which can be used across various agency's systems.
- To automate business processes for Inventory Inquiry, Reservation and Cancellation, among others.
- To provide commonly used business processes as standard service interface to all travel agencies.
- To record transactions for tracking purposes.
- To ensure agility in the implementation of future business processes.
- To enable a system that new agencies could be added seamlessly.
After evaluation of several integration middleware solutions on the market, JTB selected the Fiorano ESB based SOA Platform as it displayed the requisite ability to achieve their goals as described above.
Benefits
Seamless Integration:
The Fiorano SOA Platform has a comprehensive ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) which enables connection with multiple applications via bundled adaptors. Fiorano ESB connects various application systems over a number of protocols. In the Fiorano ESB, business data flows over high-speed asynchronous messaging channels, transferring at near real-time. Fiorano ESB is deployed over a distributed messaging bus architecture (in contrast to the traditional central-server), obviating bottle necks present in traditional large stack solutions all of which are central hub-based.
Common Data Schema:
JTB GMT decided to use the common data schema based on definitions provided by the Open Travel Alliance.
The Open Travel Alliance data schema is an XML based schema for providing data structures for electronic distribution supply chain information essentially like an EDI system for the travel industry. The Open Travel schema is used widely by airlines, car rental firms, hotels, cruise lines, railways, leisure suppliers and travel agencies.
The Fiorano ESB provided functionalities for processing XML data and EDI data transformation. Further, defining data structures as Web Service interfaces can be done easily with minimal manual work.
Agility through Business Process Automation:
A business process on the Fiorano SOA Platform consists of multiple components linked together via message-flows composed graphically. Distinct from process description methods (typically BPEL), there is no control or intervention by any process engine (such as a BPEL engine) running on a central server. Business processes built on the Fiorano ESB are choreography of distributed components linked via asynchronous message-flow chains allowing for easier deployment, modification/changes and scalability.
Faster Time to Market:
Web Service standards are used to provide a common interface to various external systems. The Fiorano ESB exposes developed business processes as a service with the SOAP protocol, without coding or definitions. WSDL definitions are generated automatically, freeing up developers from complicated and time-consuming work and enabling faster time to market.
Flexibility in Responding to Dynamic Business Variables:
The Fiorano ESB is based on asynchronous messaging which provides loose coupling of systems. This means that mediation functions, such as data transformation, recording data into database etc. can be inserted flexibly into business processes as required. The Fiorano Database adapter bundled with the ESB supports most relational database products on the market and has strong SQL statement creation capabilities.
Lower Costs:
The Fiorano ESB ships bundled with pre-built components allowing "zero-coding" implementation. Developed business processes can be re-used for new processes. These features shorten time to market cycles and reduce costs significantly.
Increased Levels of Customer Satisfaction:
Fiorano's message-based asynchronous architecture allows new business processes to be added at run-time; there is no requirement to stop and start the system. Effective system management which does not entail service suspension to existing agencies enables JTB to provide higher service levels and increased customer satisfaction.
Future Vision
Using its new service-based middleware based on the Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus, JTBGMT is able to rapidly expand its revenue stream through addition of newer partners/distributors as well as improved service levels. JTBGMT is now planning to build a private cloud on which the Fiorano ESB runs. This private cloud expands accessibility to a wide range of travel agencies worldwide creating an attractive ROI as revenues accelerate.
About Fiorano Software
Founded in 1995, Silicon Valley based Fiorano is a California Corporation with proven leadership in enterprise middleware and peer-to-peer distributed systems. Fiorano's innovative event-driven, dataflow SOA platform integrates applications and complex technologies into an enterprise nervous system, increases business process performance, yields higher message throughput and enhances availability through agent-based visual composition that bridges the capability gap between business models and their implementation - the model is the application, ready to run.
Global leaders including ABN AMRO, Boeing, British Telecom, Capgemini Telecom, Chicago Mercantile Exchange Group, McKesson, NASA, POSCO Steel, Qwest Communications, Rabobank, Schlumberger, Lockheed Martin, United States Coast Guard and Vodafone have deployed Fiorano to drive innovation through open, standards-based, dataflow SOA applications built in just days, yielding unprecedented productivity.
Fiorano Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) and FioranoMQ JMS Server, deliver the industry fastest, lowest latency, highest throughput real-time messaging (asynchronous and synchronous) to power high performance, highly available, and collaborative workflow applications whose application services are distributed throughout the IT landscape. The Fiorano Cloud Platform, is a hybrid ESB Platform that integrates applications across SaaS, PaaS and on-premise worlds. Fiorano B2B is an enterprise-level B2B gateway for transacting business electronically with customers, trading partners and distributors worldwide.
To find out more about how Fiorano can help you meet your enterprise integration objectives, visit www.fiorano.com or Email: sales@fiorano.com.