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.
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