Taking Responsiveness and Resilience to New Heights with Real-Time Data​

Operating a global airline is an exercise in constant coordination. United must orchestrate interactions across internal systems, government agencies, partners, and service providers, all while maintaining a high standard of customer experience. This creates a deeply interconnected environment where delays, outages, or latency issues can quickly cascade into operational and customer-facing problems.

At the same time, United was navigating a broader architectural shift toward cloud and hybrid environments. This introduced additional complexity around data movement, system integration, and performance. The organization needed to ensure that data could move reliably and in real time across regions, systems, and domains—while also improving resilience, reducing recovery times, and supporting future innovation.

To address these challenges, United adopted an event-driven approach using Solace Platform to help power real-time data movement across its distributed architecture. By deploying across multi-zone, multi-region public cloud environments, United established a resilient foundation capable of supporting both current operational demands and future growth.

This approach allows systems to communicate through events rather than tightly coupled integrations, improving flexibility and responsiveness. It also supports low-latency data exchange between applications, ensuring that critical operational information is delivered quickly and reliably.

• Multi-region resilience — deployed across zones and regions to maintain availability and speed recovery
• Low-latency delivery — supports real-time messaging between operational systems
• Horizontal scale — handles massive, variable demand without degradation
• Decoupled integration — reduces dependency chains and simplifies system evolution

The result is a more adaptable integration model that simplifies how systems connect and evolve, while maintaining strong governance, security, and compliance across hybrid and heterogeneous environments.

With this new foundation in place, United transformed how data moves across its ecosystem. Real-time data flow between systems now supports latency-sensitive operations, allowing applications to respond immediately to changing conditions. The shift to loosely coupled integration has reduced complexity, making it easier to introduce new services and evolve existing ones without disrupting the broader system.

• Faster response — systems react in real time to operational changes
• Simpler integration — reduced complexity across hybrid environments
• Elastic throughput — scales to billions of events without bottlenecks

Scalability has also improved significantly. United can now handle massive volumes of event traffic while maintaining consistent performance, even during peak operational periods. At the same time, the platform supports plug-and-play integration, enabling faster onboarding of new systems and more efficient collaboration across teams and partners.

The business impact of these changes is both measurable and meaningful. United reduced outage recovery time by four hours, significantly improving operational resilience and minimizing customer disruption. At the same time, the platform reliably processes approximately six billion events per day, demonstrating its ability to operate at massive scale.

• Fewer customer disruptions — faster recovery means fewer delays, cancellations, and service interruptions
• Better on-time performance — real-time operations help keep flights and connections running smoothly
• Lower operational costs — improved efficiency reduces recovery effort, manual intervention, and downstream impact

These improvements translate directly into a better passenger experience, more predictable operations, and meaningful cost savings across the business.

• Real-time AI inputs — deliver fresh, accurate data to models and agents
• Reduced data friction — simplify access across distributed systems
• Agent orchestration— support low-latency agent-to-agent interactions

By establishing a real-time data foundation, United can deliver high-quality information to AI-driven systems as it is generated, reducing integration complexity and improving overall system responsiveness.