At Southwest and at United, e-business officials said the answer lies in bridging the gap between the Web and legacy systems with middleware tools. At Southwest Airlines, Taylor must shepherd data across a hodgepodge of Unix systems of various ages, a proprietary middleware system and several Web servers. We have a proprietary system that shows flight delays. This means that every time you go out to do a Web project, you have a difficult systems integration task, and often the data has to be interpreted for the customer. In 1995, Southwest began to build its own middleware layer to start to address this problem.
More work is in progress.
United considered doing just that, replacing its proprietary Galileo reservations system, according to a United official. But that plan was quickly rejected. It was too expensive, officials said. The company solved the problem of how to make data stored in the legacy Galileo system accessible via its Web site and wireless tools by deploying a middleware package consisting of a transaction server and an application server, he said. Some 30,000 customers per month are now downloading the company's wireless and pager tools, which were first launched in December 1999, Black added.