Can a SOA Platform-as-a-Service Benefit Airlines?

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By Evee Burgard, Travel and Transportation Marketing Manager

To IT departments in the airline industry, the benefits of Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) are typically aligned to application reuse or project development costs and can produce savings of up to 40%. While these savings might seem noteworthy, when you look at the bigger picture, the total doesn’t quite reach that 40% mark. Here’s why:

• Airlines IT spend ranges anywhere from 2% to 3% of industry revenue.
• Of this 2% to 3%, airlines disburse approximately 70% on IT maintenance.
• Add to this the rising costs associated to legacy passenger services systems maintenance requirements, and the 40% savings could realistically equate to less than 1% to 3% of IT-spend, which is inconsequential.

With these true SOA savings in mind, airline CIOs need to look beyond application reuse and project development costs and consider the even greater value of SOA -- business flexibility and improving enterprise decision making.

A SOA Platform-as-a-service (PaaS) can deliver business flexibility and improve enterprise decision making. SOA PaaS allows airlines to rapidly develop and deploy applications that enable them to innovate, differentiate themselves in the marketplace, and create new revenue streams to satisfy the always-connected traveler. SOA PaaS can help drive more revenue per seat, while decreasing business and IT costs without any capital outlay. The benefit of more revenue and lower costs is what will drive the highest value to the airlines and is the main reason airline CIOs should seriously consider SOA PaaS. 

HP has lowered development, maintenance and operating costs by 30% to 50% for its travel and transportation clients. We are the only service provider to offer a transportation industry-specific SOA platform including software, services and hardware, and we recently announced a new SOA PaaS service tailored to the airline industry.

Delivered as a Platform-as-a-Service, HP recently announced an Airline Service Oriented Architecture Platform  that addresses airlines’ needs for cost reduction, business scale and agility. It does this by providing airlines with HP’s modern application development platform optimized for airlines.

A number of key tenets have been applied in order to provide a solution capable of supporting a wide variety of airline needs in the areas of functionality, scalability and reliability:

• Cost effective development and deployment with a service orientation and competitive cost structure
• Rapid development and deployment with faster time-to-market, customization, and “write once, build and deploy anywhere” capabilities
• Integrated approach across multiple systems to maximize productivity

What are the benefits of SOA PaaS to your organization? Is it helping you to lower costs or increase efficiencies? Can you see how it could make a difference for your airline?

To learn more about HP Airline SOA, please visit these resources:

• HP Airline Service Oriented Architecture Platform
• Consumer Travel
• HP Passenger Service Solution
• HP Converged Cloud solutions