Inprise Corporation (Nasdaq: INPR), a premier provider of distributed software solutions for leading enterprises, today announced the American Automobile Association (AAA) has adopted Inprise’s VisiBroker for Java object request broker (ORB) technology as a key building block for its new travel reservation system that will go live by end of this year. With more than 40 million members, AAA is the largest motoring and travel organization in the world.
AAA is using VisiBroker to develop high-performance computing systems that provide a wide range of travel reservation products and services to meet its member customers’ needs, such as air, hotel, car rental, and cruise bookings—as well as auto-travel routing requests and assistance. The automobile organization selected VisiBroker as its distributed object infrastructure because of its superior integrated development tools and its ability to tie-in disparate data sources, such as Apollo, one of the largest global reservation systems for the travel industry. According to AAA, VisiBroker also provides the scalability to service its 40 million members association-wide.

“AAA’s travel reservation system is a prime example of how organizations are turning to information systems to deliver better, less-expensive services to their customers, partners, and employees,” said Randy Hietter, Inprise director of VisiBroker product marketing. “AAA’s early success with VisiBroker shows how CORBA-based solutions can contribute to this mission by providing a flexible, robust, and reliable way to extend legacy computing environments to the Web.”

AAA is a federation made up of 94 independent clubs that are part of an overall AAA association. Because each club uses different hardware and software to meet its diverse business needs, AAA was looking to build one application that would enable the integration of each individual club’s disparate legacy systems; provide information access to a large number of users throughout the federation; and save time and money on application development. AAA chose VisiBroker for Java to help create this application to integrate its core business services - and to better support the needs of both small and large AAA clubs nationwide.

“VisiBroker’s CORBA architecture lended itself well to accommodating our clubs’ needs. Because VisiBroker is platform-independent, it doesn’t matter what type of technology that our clubs are using on the back-end - they can take advantage of the objects we’ve created and then develop their own interface, which ultimately streamlines our business process,” said Peter Eberley, senior developer, AAA. “We also wanted to enable a large number of concurrent users. By using VisiBroker, we can distribute our CORBA services over a variety of machines, or co-locate them next to the database to reduce network latency. VisiBroker gives us a variety of configuration options, and has enabled us to develop a truly robust application to meet our members’ needs.”

Inprise VisiBroker—The Leading Deployed ORB Technology
Inprise’s VisiBroker for Java and VisiBroker for C++ CORBA object request brokers are designed to facilitate the development and deployment of distributed enterprise applications that are scalable, flexible, and easily-maintained. Industry alliances with Oracle, Hitachi, Novell, Netscape, Silicon Graphics, and others have played a key role in making VisiBroker the leading deployed and adopted ORB in the computer industry, with over 30 million licenses worldwide.

About AAA
With more than 40 million members, the American Automobile Association is the largest motoring and travel organization in the world. AAA’s more than 1,000 affiliated club and branch offices are located throughout the United States and Canada. One of the nation’s largest leisure-travel agencies, AAA offers air, hotel, car rental and cruise and tour bookings, plus numerous discounts and auto-travel routing and assistance.

About Inprise Corporation
Inprise Corporation is a leading provider of software and services that simplify the complexity of enterprise application development, deployment, and management. The company is distinguished for its award-winning Borland family of rapid application development products and for proven scalable middleware. Inprise integrates these offerings with application management products to provide customers with end-to-end solutions. Inprise customers include leading enterprises and independent software developers around the world. Founded in 1983, Inprise is headquartered in Scotts Valley, California and has operations around the world. Inprise has more than 900 employees worldwide.

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