Getting Lift from SOA

When Air Canada spun off Aeroplan, its frequent flyer rewards program, as a separate entity in 2001, the new company faced some tough challenges. Not the least of them was building an IT infrastructure, including e-commerce capabilities, almost from scratch. Virtually from day one, though, the Aeroplan IT brains trust agreed that the best way to achieve their goals was by implementing a service oriented architecture (SOA). Building an SOA naturally entailed a few challenges of its own, as Remi Lafrance, general manager of technology operations and head of the company's IT architecture group (ITAG), discovered. But five years on, the challenges have for the most part been met and the e-commerce capabilities are in place. The SOA isn't complete but it's 70 percent there, Lafrance  says, and it's already paying dividends. Aeroplan has enjoyed significant success. It raised Rs 1,100 crore in an IPO in 2005. In fiscal 2007, the company reported income of Rs 758 crore - a 35.1 percent increase over 2006, its second consecutive year of double digit growth.

"If you look at the number of partners we've signed up, where we are now versus where we were back then, and the impact Aeroplan has had overall in Canada as a loyalty company - those are the results, in good part, of the work we've done in expanding our IT capabilities," Lafrance says. Aeroplan started as a cost centre. It was a program offering Air Canada customers one way, and one way only, to accumulate reward miles and redeem them: fly Air Canada, then fly again. In 2001, the new entity was faced with remaking itself as a for-profit enterprise, which would mean transforming its simple business model and finding new sources of revenue.

In the 'loyalty' business, the way to do this was by adding new partners - merchants and brands anxious for access to the airline's choice customer base and willing to pay for the privilege. Aeroplan has been singularly successful in this, adding more than 90 partners since 2001. Some are partners whose products members can buy to accumulate points; others have products Aeroplan can offer as rewards. This in turn leads to expansion of the member base; nonflyers now have a way to accumulate miles, which attracts more partners, and so on.

Working with New Partners

But the company had to somehow keep a lid on the costs of setting up and working with new partners. In 2002, there were no automated systems for communicating with partners. The whole reward-redemption process itself was largely unautomated, and Aeroplan's e-commerce presence amounted to a few static pages at the Air Canada site. So one of the first priorities was creating a modern e-commerce-based Web site and infrastructure that would allow partners to interact directly with Aeroplan systems. The initial breakthrough came when the company implemented an SOA-based e-commerce firewall from Reactivity, now owned by Cisco Systems.

Among other things, the Reactivity technology allows partners to securely exchange XML messages with Aeroplan over the Net. "This opened up all sorts of possibilities in terms of direct connect between Aeroplan's infrastructure and external infrastructures to allow the flow of e-commerce," Lafrance says. "And we saw that we could start leveraging that and using service oriented architecture to a far greater extent." The next major undertaking, begun in 2004, was to build an enterprise software bus (ESB). It would handle co-ordination between front-ends - of various partners as well as Aeroplan - and Aeroplan's legacy back-end transactional systems. The company had cobbled together the architecture to this point from open source components such as Linux, Apache, and J2EE (Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition), and it remained committed to standards based and open source technology.

Laying Out the SOA Roadmap

"But when it came to the ESB," Lafrance says, "we didn't want to take any risks around performance or capabilities. So we made a decision to do it the standard way, with commercial-grade, tier-one type software." After issuing an RFP and reviewing a small handful of solutions, Aeroplan chose BEA Systems and its WebLogic and AquaLogic products, the latter developed in partnership with Vancouverbased Elastic Path Software. According to Lafrance, the vendor was the only respondent that could demonstrate how it would tackle the project while ensuring Aeroplan was able to continue doing business through the development and transition processes. "Continuity of business was critical, and they demonstrated with a pilot, at no cost to us, their ability to take on that responsibility and make it work in relatively short order," he says. The result is a framework that now makes it relatively easy to add new partnerships and build new applications around them.

One simple example is a recent project with Pepsi. Aeroplan members can accumulate 10 miles with the purchase of a Quaker orange juice product. (Pepsi owns Quaker.) They go to a Pepsi-branded Web site and type in their name and Aeroplan number. The Pepsi server communicates with the Aeroplan ESB, which authenticates the name and member number in the member profile database, reports back to Pepsi, then updates the member's plan to add the 10 miles when the transaction is completed. "Now in the majority of cases we're building on stuff we already have," Lafrance says. "This is cutting down on the time to implement because we're reusing a bit of this, a bit of that. Maybe we're adding new service we didn't have before, but when we do, now we do it in such a way that we can reuse it next time." Thanks to this reusability Aeroplan can implement new automated partner relationships 15 to 20 percent faster than it could before. That will increase to 30 to 40 percent faster as the company phases in more use of the WebLogic technology, and save an estimated Rs 12 lakh to Rs 32 lakh per partner, he says. While the ESB project alone cost over Rs 12 crore, Lafrance declined to put figures on either the total cost of the SOA undertaking or the potential return on investment. SOA, he says, is simply the company's "new modus operandi." Time to implement and related cost savings were not the only benefits, though. The demonstrable speed to implement also helps Aeroplan sell its brand when it enters into negotiations with a prospective new partner. "The SOA framework is not only allowing us to develop more, but also to showcase more," Lafrance says. And SOA delivers a "whole slew of benefits from an IT development life cycle perspective." The framework makes it easier for his team to measure results and manage application quality assurance, for example.