Newsmakers: System One Promotes Davidson To CEO Spot

<B> Newsmakers: System One Promotes Davidson To CEO Spot</B>

By Cheryl Rosen

<I>Miami</I> - System One Amadeus, the U.S. National Distribution Company for Amadeus Global Travel Distribution, last week named Jim Davidson president and chief executive officer, following the departure of longtime head Bill Diffenderffer.

Davidson, formerly the CRS's sales and marketing vice president, has his work cut out for him. Owned in equal parts by Amadeus, Continental Airlines and EDS, System One for the past 18 months has been undergoing a difficult conversion to move its 183,000 travel agency customers to a single global Amadeus platform. Davidson last week told BTN that job is virtually complete now, freeing the company to turn its focus away from the back room and back to its customers.

"All the resources we have been putting into this massive project can now be focused on our key markets--the travel agency and the corporate marketplace. Our partnership deal with SAP will bring a full set of travel management products with the SAP look and feel to Corporate America. That's really the first order of business. Then we're taking a look at how MAX, our back office system for travel agencies, interfaces with that and reconciles the back end."

Also on the agenda is the full release of the Internet-based Corporate Traveler booking system, "a neat product that we chose not to support on two systems, but now plan to roll out by mid-year," Davidson said. "We just haven't had the capacity to bring that product to market until the internal project was done."

Indeed, Davidson has high hopes for rapidly catching up in the global quest for corporate end-to-end solutions. "Corporate customers, be they American or European or Asian, want booking and reporting tools, but they want them well integrated into existing corporate systems. Rather than fighting the integration battle, we have aligned ourselves with someone who had that battle won," he said.

Diffenderffer, unavailable for comment last week, is expected today to announce his new job. Declining to "steal Bill's thunder," Davidson would say only that his former boss' new position is "close to the travel industry."

Overall, he added, his path going forward will build on the successful game plan Diffenderffer drew up and pretty much followed to completion. "Bill's strategy emphasized getting global and having a consistent product that our customers could grow with, and we've done that," Davidson said. "Now we're getting back to the basics of selling and supporting. Out of the box we're going to look at bolstering our support and getting more aggressive in selling the product now that it's stabilized, and jump on getting the SAP product line out in the market.