Carnival Cruise Line is in the experience business. It doesn’t start when the “all aboard” sounds, and it doesn’t end when happy passengers disembark. The experience starts far before—when cruisers shop for (and dream about) their next vacation—any time, anywhere and from any device.
What the customer sees is simple—a few clicks on carnival.com or from countless other travel booking sites and they’ll instantly have two tickets to paradise. But behind the scenes is a flurry of activity through a tangled web of connections and travel distribution networks (such as Sabre) that need to be closely managed. Simply put, it’s the complicated price of simplicity. And as more travel partners become more digital, Carnival needs to make partner onboarding intuitive, efficient and economical.
Before, during, and after a cruise, Carnival faces challenges unique to business at sea. Complex shipboard systems must exchange data with myriad shoreside systems that span all types of environments (on-prem, hybrid, cloud). Data handoff, synchronization and transformation must happen seamlessly and quickly for dozens of cruises every week. “Just from a guest experience perspective—during and after cruise—we have to have a completely seamless handshake between the shipboard applications and shoreside applications,” says Srinivas Danduboyina, Supervisor of Enterprise Integration Architecture at Carnival Cruise Line.
Carnival needed to address these challenges with a savvy and secure approach to integrating everything. It required an integration solution that could be both incredibly flexible and relentlessly dependable. Carnival knew that having a monolithic approach to applications would create inherent risks—where if a single connection wasn’t working it could take down the entire application.
Carnival’s Enterprise Integration team realized that a combination of event-driven and API-led integration was the answer to make sure that everything could work together seamlessly while keeping security, cost, and performance optimization always top of mind.
Carnival selected IBM webMethods to drive its API-led integration. “In our case, we invested in webMethods Integration, managed file transfer (MFT) and API Gateway. These tools have enabled us to onboard partners at a rapid pace around the globe,” says Danduboyina. When choosing webMethods as its solution, Carnival pointed to its capability to work across multiple hosting environments, applications and platforms. “We always have partners who will have their own cloud, on-prem or hybrid environments. With that in mind, any integration solution we planned to select must seamlessly interface and integrate with our solution providers.”
The enterprise service bus (ESB) platform brought new built-in capabilities, enabling Carnival to focus on configuring connections, integrations and APIs without having to build from scratch. With webMethods API Gateway, Carnival can manage API access and usage with precision, using predefined policies. The company uses the API Gateway’s built-in security layer to help defend against API-based cyberattacks while integrating with partners around the world.
Like many organizations today, Carnival positions IT as a primary means of doing what it does best—providing a fun and seamless experience for its guests. In Carnival’s complex operations environment, secure, continuous and reliable integration is always a priority. Using APIs and other integration toolsets, Carnival IT can efficiently deliver loosely decoupled and reusable integrations and interfaces for applications and business groups, optimizing its ROI.
“Our IT enterprise integration architecture puts the guest at the center. From shopping to booking to cruising, our API-driven architecture and event-driven ESB play a key role in making the guest and crew experience the best it can be,” says Danduboyina. Carnival uses the webMethods Suite for flexible and reliable connectivity to help ensure smooth sailing ahead and fun for all.
Carnival Cruise Line (link resides outside of ibm.com) was founded in 1972 and is owned by Carnival Corporation. The company operates 27 cruise ships that take millions of guests every year on 2–29-day voyages, departing from every coast in the US to destinations in the Caribbean, the Pacific and across the Atlantic.
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