Summary

IBM acts as IT partner to Air Canada to implement a series of standalone mobile applications for Air Canada including their mobile check-in and flight booking applications.

Air Canada is Canada's largest full-service airline providing services to domestic, US and international markets and serves close to 35 million passengers annually. The Air Canada website is one of the most highly trafficked Canadian websites.

The Challenge

Air Canada offers a range of services to enable its customers to manage their travel experience on mobile devices. IBM helps Air Canada maintain these applications which enable customers to check in, verify their flight status, get notifications, access flight passes, upgrade, and access information and services via their mobile devices. These services are available via the mobile web as well as through ‘hybrid’ apps for iOS, Blackberry and Android.

With such a varied and dynamic device landscape, IBM needs to understand the exact capabilities of accessing devices to ensure all traffic is properly handled. IBM needs to utilize a range of properties from accessing devices, such as make and model, screen size, JavaScript support, and whether the device is SSL capable. IBM uses this information to adapt the experience according to the accessing device.

The Solution

In order to ensure that these services work on all accessing devices, IBM implemented the DeviceAtlas server side device detection solution to detect mobile traffic in real time and understand the capabilities of each requesting device.

Specific properties they use include:

• Device make and model
• SSL capability
• Whether JavaScript is enabled
• Screen width and height

When a customer uses a mobile service, the headers in the HTTP requests to the server are used to identify the specific device, return the desired properties to make a decision on content being served back to the device.

IBM chose to work with DeviceAtlas, an established player in the mobile industry, due to its high speed detection, and its comprehensive and accurate coverage of more than 14,000 mobile and web enabled devices and its ease of implementation.

Analytics

IBM also leverage DeviceAtlas information by running scripts on Air Canada web logs to determine and report the characteristics of devices accessing Air Canada’s services. IBM typically reports the breakdown of mobile OS’s that are accessing mobile services.

Results

DeviceAtlas allows IBM to support Air Canada by making their mobile applications always device aware. Deployed locally at web server level, DeviceAtlas is capable of detecting millions of devices per second. IBM uses the REST API to automatically update device data on a daily basis.

This ensures that they have the most current device information available and are supporting all devices that access Air Canada’s services.