Integration Platform & Business Rules Engine
Powering travel supplier integration, distribution channel
management and dynamic packaging
xDistributor, the core travel distribution platform from OpenJaw Technologies, powers many of the world’s leading travel companies. It combines a sophisticated Standards based XML switching and aggregation platform with a powerful Business Rules Engine, allowing travel companies to manage supplier connections and distribution channels with unrivalled flexibility and control.
It enables you to
- Manage supplier connections and distribution channels
- Search against multiple suppliers simultaneously and provide a single integrated response
- Manage complex process flows such as dynamic package searching and pricing
- Change and deploy business rules quickly and easily using the integrated Business Rules Engine
- Transaction management for secure booking of inventory held across multiple suppliers
Distribution channel management
xDistributor allows you to control what information is available to each channel and how it is presented e.g. pricing, mark-ups and discounts, supplier connectivity and client access control.
Supplier connectivity
- xDistributor contains a wide range of protocol adapters for connecting to suppliers over SOAP, HTTP, JDBC, SMTP, FTP, Web Scraping or C++/Java APIs. The supplier interface is extendible, allowing the addition of new adapters which can easily be developed and deployed.
- xDistributor normalises supplier interfaces at both the data and the process flow level. Responses from suppliers are normalised into a common XML Schema using compiled XSLT stylesheets. Supplier processes which require multiple steps, such as schedule/availability/pricing can be exposed as a single request/response service.
- Multiple supplier responses can be merged into a single client response. Duplicate removal, filtering and sorting rules can be applied to manage multi-supplier response sets.
- A wide range of suppliers for flights, car rental, hotels, extras, payment providers and back-office can be added easily using our pre-configured connectors.
Business rules
Our easy-to-use business rules editor allows non-technical users to add and remove marketing promotions enabling them to react quickly to market conditions. Business rules are defined through a simple and intuitive browser-based editor which can be easily defined to control pricing, process flows, presentation and supplier management.
xDistributor has three business rules interfaces to cater for different categories of users: Business user, administrator and technical user. Business rules are compiled into Java code for efficient execution at runtime.
Process flow management
Process flows are controlled by business rules to allow select suppliers to be utilised for various types of searching. For example, one GDS/direct connect may be used for flight searches on most routes, while another GDS/direct connect may be used on certain routes for last seat availability.
An intelligent response cache, controlled by business rules, can be used to lower cost of frequent searches.
Process flows can be configured to allow secure bookings of inventory held across multiple suppliers. A 2-phase transaction layer allows book and commit/rollback of complex transactions containing air/hotel/car/other booking, payment, back-office hand-off, confirmation e-mails, etc.
Security
xDistributor management console provides role-based access control to restrict access to configuration, business rules and pricing lookup tables. This allows sets of business rules to be exposed to limited user groups on intranet/extranet.
Scalability
xDistributor is 100% stateless and scales linearly. Multiple xDistributor instances may be deployed behind a sticky or non-sticky load-balancer. A single management console can manage multiple groups of xDistributor runtime server instances, allowing secure and easy deployment of business rules as well as system health monitoring.