British Aerospace Airbus

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Tools Used:
PeerLogic's LiveContentBROKER™, Select Software's Object Modelling Tool, CORBA®, Java™, C++

Description:
PeerLogic, in partnership with Computer Science Corporation Ltd (CSC), rolled out one of the world's biggest single deployment of CORBA-compliant object request broker technology at British Aerospace Airbus. The five-year contract is worth 2.5 million dollars. Based on PeerLogic's LiveContentBROKER Object Request Broker (ORB), the technology will eventually be used by up to 4,000 employees as part of the company's five year Information Management Strategy.

British Aerospace Airbus has contracted the partnership for the integration of its legacy business systems and applications into a unified information infrastructure linked with new object-based applications. British Aerospace Airbus is the wing design and manufacturing component of the pan-European Airbus Industrie consortium, recognized as Boeing's competition in Europe. PeerLogic is working in partnership with CSC and British Aerospace Airbus to provide consultancy and implementation skills while providing the technology using SELECT Software's Object Modelling tool and the LiveContentBROKER ORB. It is also working closely with CSC, British Aerospace's IT outsourcing partner, on providing skills transfer to implement and deploy the object technology.

"We chose distributed object technology for its high degree of flexibility in managing rapid change within the organization without compromising the quality of our IT support systems," said Francis Hayden, British Aerospace Airbus object strategy consultant. "Only PeerLogic offered the combination of an in-depth knowledge of our industry with a strategic commitment to CORBA technology and an understanding of the organizational challenges arising from their implementation."

The pilot phase will enable British Aerospace Airbus to prove that object technology will work successfully in a distributed computing environment linking new object-based applications with legacy systems. The pilot will be used to implement i500, PeerLogic's X.500 product directory service initially for 380 users with a goal to roll it out to 3,800 users. New business applications will be developed using object technology. The objects are first modeled using the Select Object Modeling tool, developed using languages such as Java and C++ and then distributed by the Object Request Broker. In effect, LiveContentBROKER will form the hub of all future integrated applications by creating an environment in which objects are managed independently of the hardware and network in use.

LiveContentBROKER is based on the Object Management Group's Common Object Request Broker Architecture (CORBA) standard. PeerLogic is an active member of the Object Management Group and has provided several reference implementations of the CORBA standard.