News

JetBlue Adds SOA Management

• By Linda L. Briggs
• August 15, 2005

JetBlue Airways plans to secure and monitor what the airline anticipates will be a growing number of Web services with the help of SOA Software’s Service Manager.

The six-year-old, rapidly growing airline will use the SOA product to provide the mediation layer needed to secure and manage Web services transactions across the company’s network.

According to Tyrone Paige, senior software architect at JetBlue, the airline was interested in the SOA product initially for its security features. “We liked how the security piece worked. Then [SOA Software] showed us how we could also monitor Web services and enforce SLAs [Service Level Agreements].”

JetBlue, with approximately 8,000 employees, is using Microsoft .NET, BizTalk Server and SQL Server on its network. It is migrating to Web services and a service-oriented architecture to help meet growing demand for its air services, and to better work with business partners.

Paige says one appealing factor of SOA’s product was the one-stop vendor idea. “It had what we needed in one package. That simplifies things—one vendor, one contract… We got the security and the monitoring piece all in one package.” According to SOA, JetBlue also considered other vendors, including Systinet, Amberpoint, Actional and Reactivity, before settling on SOA Software.

Paige says he’s looking forward to closely monitoring and tracking both Web services and SLAs. “As we start rolling out Web services, they’ll be registered with the SOA registry. Then we can monitor [them]—who’s using them, response times and so forth… I can get a pretty good view of what’s going on with the Web services and who’s using them.” The airline emphasizes security, service level agreements and governance, he says, and particularly wants to monitor those.

“This will move us in the right direction in terms of agility, flexibility and getting things to market quicker,” Paige says.