Users still bullish on Web services

Galileo International hit a home run last year with a pilot of four Web services designed to help extend the reach of its travel booking and itinerary services.

The number of Galileo customers using the services - now in production mode - has risen from one to 35, and those customers are clamoring for more. The company, buoyed by cost savings and new business opportunities associated with the project, last week started rolling out Web services globally. Galileo also is taking the next step by building a service-oriented architecture (SOA) for use across the Travel Distribution Services division of parent-company Cendant.

"Getting into this game was the most important step," says Todd Dubner, vice president of product innovation for the Parsippany, N.J., company. "Now that we are in it, we are reaping rewards that we could not forecast a year and a half ago."

Galileo was one of three Web services pioneers profiled by Network World about a year ago when the hype meter on the emerging technology was redlining. Now, as we revisit them, Galileo and fellow early adopter Eastman Chemical are sold on the technology and are pushing on. The third organization - the University of California, Berkeley - has shelved Web services for now, although the school expects to return to it down the road (see our initial profiles: Galileo, Eastman and UC-Berkeley).

Organizations such as travel agencies and corporate travel planners report development times have been reduced by 80% to 90% for building applications that extract data and execute transactions on Galileo's Global Distribution System (GDS), the hub of its business.

"A single availability call to our GDS has been reduced from 100 lines of code to just three with Web services," says Robert Wiseman, CTO for Galileo.

And they're finding creative uses for Web services that Galileo never imagined, such as automating touchless ticketing for travelers, streamlining corporate back-office operations and altering their workflow processes for more efficiency.

Also, expensive dedicated lines have now been replaced by Internet access.

Galileo says there has been a bigger effect internally, where the Web services slashed the cost and development time of a dozen new products last year by up to 50%.

It has added up to millions of dollars in savings and additional revenue.

Reuse of Web services components and increased flexibility are big themes and have touched off development of an SOA. An SOA consists of application components that live as services on a network and can be assembled in infinite combinations.

The company has built an authentication and authorization gateway it calls Expo and a service brokering engine that will form one secure entry point for all Web services calls to the GDS, which handles 350 million messages per day and more than 1 billion fare quotes per year.

"We will have different conversion capabilities to go from XML to Java and back again, different brokering technologies, different service-delivery network technologies," Wiseman says. "We will need to validate things like interoperability, where we can do logging and so on." He expects to have the SOA reference implementation done this year and a production model in 2004.

"Building toward a common standardized SOA gives us huge benefits for reusability across the company," Wiseman says. "As new product requirements come about, you don't have to start from a whiteboard anymore. You can assemble products from existing components."