British Airways (BA) will use service-oriented architecture (SOA) to integrate over 600 passenger and airport systems in a major IT update.

The project will last until the end of 2014 and aims to bring new products to market faster and reduce cost.

“BA's goal is to transform the travel experience. The flexibility of the SOA [tools] allows BA to extend the features of its e-commerce site right through to its airports, by allowing greater self-service functionality and 'plug and play' capability," explained the airline’s chief technology officer Gordon Penfold.

“The airport environment is complex and the systems are mission critical and moving this to a highly automated environment is a challenge, but SOA quickly proved itself to be the right approach to achieving our goal of a fully agile environment,” he said.

At a time other carriers are drastically reducing IT investment, BA’s investment in the service-oriented tools are expected to provide a competitive advantage.

“The new SOA infrastructure is far more flexible and we are looking to roll out new services more quickly. At the same time, real-time data synchronisation means information quality is improved and costs are saved thanks to reduction in data replication,” said Penfold.

The tools are being supplied by Progress Software.