Cendant – 2006 JBoss Innovation Award Winner – Core Infrastructure

Geography: Chicago, IL

Overview
Selected for their use of JBoss AS and its JMX capabilities as the foundation for their services container that allows them to provision core travel services more quickly and efficiently to a number of leading travel sites including Orbitz.com and Cheaptickets.com.

1. Please describe your company. (Number of employees, private/public, industry, etc.)

Orbitz was founded in 2000 by five leading airlines. The orbitz.com site launched in 2001 and has become one of the top 3 travel sites. Orbitz was purchased by Cendant Corporation in November 2004.

Cendant Distribution Travel Services Group, Inc. (“TDS”), the entity that oversees Orbitz and the other travel distribution companies at Cendant, is the official support customer for JBoss. TDS made the strategic decision to roll JBoss across all of its platforms, which supports the following websites:

• Orbitz.com
• Cheaptickets.com
• Travelport.com
• Lodging.com
• Orbitzforbusiness.com
• Parts of American Airlines’ website
• Parts of United Airlines’ website
• Parts of Northwest Airlines’ website
• A number of other third-party ‘white label’ sites

2. Please describe the business and/or technical challenges you faced in this project.

Over the past six years, TDS has developed hundreds of custom, scalable, Jini applications that ran within a home grown service container that allowed them to monitor and provision new instances as necessary. These services spanned a number of travel booking needs including rate, re-price, and availability requests as well as the actual booking transactions themselves. The collective services ran across a large farm of several hundred servers.

When Orbitz became part of the TDS business in 2004, TDS determined that it would need to expand the number of travel websites in deployment. The existing home grown services container could not handle the additional complexity so TDS began searching for a new services platform for hosting the growing number of applications. For external-facing services, the TDS team also identified a need to expose these applications as Web services.

From a technical perspective, TDS was primarily interested in a modular container that could expose services with Jini and managed via JMX and that could deploy their SARs easily. This allows TDS to minimize the complexity and manpower needed to run our Network Operations Center. This was a very important point for TDS – the need to run dozens of websites consisting of hundreds of travel services, across a massive server farm, which could be provisioned quickly and easily as needed, without requiring much, if any, manual intervention from the Operations staff.

3. What was the desired solution?

TDS chose JBoss Application Server for its JMX capabilities first and foremost. Because most of the applications are Jini-based, there wasn’t a strong need for a Servlet / EJB / JSP container. Instead, we were primarily interested in a lightweight JMX-based container. The innovative capability for the JBoss AS container to deploy SARs was also a major selling point and will have a major impact on the future management costs associated with the services.

Unlike before when the Orbitz home grown container was in use, TDS can now rely on JBoss for any and all bug fixes associated with the container. Previously. our developers were primarily focused on creating new business-critical services and the core platform container was often neglected. As a JBoss Subscription customer, TDS can now focus all of its attention on building new services and rely on JBoss to continue to innovate and support the core container. This has a positive impact on the business.

The open source nature of JBoss AS also means that our developers get direct access to the code. This is extremely important. It means that a TDS developer can read the source code, understand the inner workings of the container, and correct any application flaws in much less time compared to using a closed source platform. It’s not unusual for a TDS developer to get a call at 3AM if a service is down and the ability for this developer to have access to both the source code and to the technical experts at JBoss has proven to be invaluable.

4. Please describe your vendor selection process and why you chose JBoss Solutions in the end.

Open source software has played an important role in the ability of Orbitz to compete successfully with entrenched companies that are much larger and much better funded. When reviewing application servers, an open source solution was a priority. When comparing the contenders, Orbitz liked the following attributes of the JBoss Application Sever resulting in their JBoss selection:

Technology – Wanted a JMX-based container, ability to deploy SARs easily, and needed the container to run on JDK 1.5, which was uncommon at this particular time.

Support – As one of the leading travel sites of they world, Orbitz understands extremely well the cost of service downtime. As such, developers will be paged if a flaw is discovered – whether that be during normal business operations or at 3AM. It is important to Orbitz that these developers have access to the source code, a large web-based knowledgebase, and direct access to the real experts behind the code.

Financial – In a notoriously competitive market with thin margins already, cost savings was a major factor when selecting an application server. Considering that the Orbitz Web and Middle-tier consists of hundreds of dual-processor servers running multiple JVMs and instances of their services means that open source has saved Orbitz an extremely large amount of money in software licenses.

Open Source Community Involvement – with a unique deployment they wanted to ensure the roadmap fit with their direction. They wanted to us an open source product where they had the opportunity to contribute and influence the future of a project by interacting with project owners and ability to submit feedback.

5. What role did Red Hat and/or JBoss products play in the final solution?

See section 3 for more details on the role of JBoss Application Server. Hibernate is also used for persistence.

6. What was the overall impact of the project on your business? (e.g. improved ROI, increased competitive advantage, better time to market, etc.)

TDS has noticed ROI in operational efficiencies. JBoss AS has allowed TDS to provision services very quickly and efficiently and allows TDS to manage a large Web and Middleware farm consisting of several hundred servers running several hundred services with only a very small Network Operations Center staff. As the TDS business has grown and technical complexity has increased, TDS has not had to increase the operations management staff and costs accordingly.

Thereare also major cost savings associated with eliminating all Middleware software licenses for this large server farm. TDS does not make public specific financial savings however.

Additionally, the open source nature of JBoss AS means that TDS developers have the chance to read the source code and understand the true reasons for any application performance issues. This has allowed TDS to dramatically reduce downtime compared to using a closed source, commercial product.

7. With the savings gained from implementing JEMS, how did you reallocate your cost savings within your company?
The cost savings that came from eliminating software licenses have made an impact to TDS’s bottom line. Additionally, by eliminating the need to further build out and maintain the core platform, TDS can now focus more of its application development team on creating new business-relevant services.

8. Please provide a technical description of implementation, including the size of deployment. (i.e. Hardware specs, applications, O/S, databases, etc.)
Servers: Rackable hardware, mostly X86 with dual AMD processors each running multiple JVMs
OS: Linux (Red Hat 3.0) throughout
Database: Primarily Oracle but also some MySQL and Postgres
Application Server: JBoss AS
See the JBoss Innovation Award Submission for a diagram

9. Did you leverage Red Hat support services, training, or consulting? If so, please describe your experience?

TDS is an Enterprise Support Customer. TDS’s experience with JBoss support has been positive thus far. Early interaction was important with JBoss Sales Manager and consultants because of their atypical Jini deployment.

10. Do you have advice for other companies facing a similar business challenge?

JBoss has proven to be a solid technology solution at TDS and we believe open source solutions such as JBoss have contributed to our success in the technology sector. Companies need to realize the tremendous advantage open source can contribute, such as reduced licensing cost and access to source code. Our advice is to not be tentative and “embrace open source.”