Is the Orbitz story symbolic of the ASP industry

Is the Orbitz story symbolic of the ASP industry’s missed opportunity?
By Max Smetannikov
from HostingTech.com

The red-hot online travel reservation industry should have been a fertile field for hosting companies, particularly ASPs (Application Service Providers). New Economy players had a technological head start, but they squandered their advantage to older airline reservation systems and multibillion-dollar corporations like Microsoft. It should come as little surprise. The hosting industry in general has failed miserably at predicting demand from blue-chip online customers. The few survivors essentially became mom-and- pop connectivity and facility vendors. However, if there is any hope today for the daring startup, it is embodied by Orbitz (www.orbitz.com).

Orbitz, backed by American, Continental, Delta, Northwest, and United Airlines — and seeking to raise $125 million in an initial public offering — is a case study in how large Web hosts, independent software vendors, and large carriers could have succeeded in delivering services that make sense for owners of large online properties. In the wake of their failure, the mission- specific engineering performed in-house is filling the need for useful applications. “We found that, as much as we didn’t want to try and build everything by ourselves, most of the things that third- party providers were offering fell well short of what our goals were,” says Alex Zoghlin, Orbitz chief technical officer.

Building On A Good Idea
The Orbitz story is an unlikely hymn to the business of colocation and managed bandwidth. Hosted at WorldCom (not Digex) and Exodus (not Digital Island), Orbitz understandably does not want any managed services from its hosting vendors.

What Orbitz does want is competitively priced colocation, key- card access to its hardware, more security on top of that, and good bandwidth. The company does recognize the value of well- peered networks, noting that replicating WorldCom’s connectivity would be prohibitively expensive. With that, the company steered clear from any managed service offerings. This was also partially due to the fact that Orbitz’s back-end requirements seemed exotic when the company launched in 1999.

Orbitz runs two server farms, one at WorldCom, the other at Cable & Wireless, both consisting of clusters of Linux PCs. These clusters run complex algorithms, developed by a specialized software vendor, which do calculations of air-travel fares on the fly.

“No one ever tried to replicate the mainframe complexities of air travel on clusters of small machines before,” says Zoghlin. The most complicated part of the system is information collection. Orbitz taps into a range of third-party networks, such as airline reservation systems, hotel reservation systems, and insurance agencies and encodes all the data it receives from these sources into XML (eXtensible Markup Language). By having the data encoded into a universal language that all elements of its distributed processing network “understands,” Orbitz can develop specialized applications that direct the data to the correct user and can reconfigure it for the correct enduser device. For instance, arrival and departure information changes can be routed to individual users’ text pagers, if requested.

A range of companies, from startups like Terraspring to giants like IBM, has sought ways to repurpose and market pieces of this architecture. The concept of grid computing is catching on, where endusers like Orbitz would be able to tap into a mainframe-like environment with algorithms that would have to be only slightly altered to support applications like airline fare calculations. Encoding information generated by applications running in different computing environments has been the holy grail of distributed computing for years, with initiatives as old as Sun’s Java and as young as Microsoft’s .NET still years away from delivering a comprehensive solution. Developing enduser, device-sensitive information-delivery systems has developed into an industry of its own, with even traditional airline reservation systems like WorldSpan (www.worldspan.com) offering services addressing this niche.

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