GDSs Are Looking Inward: Reinventing Distribution Technology, Part Two

A wave of public attention is exposing global distribution costs and pricing to more scrutiny than ever, compelling some GDSs to reconsider the economics, as all take on the reinvention of their core technology.

Web-based travel services place much higher demands than agents do on the GDSs' 30-year-old IBM Transaction Processing Facility systems. That and the cost of labor top the list of many factors leading GDSs to move gradually to new operating systems. These platforms more frequently appear on the résumés of today's programmers; in general, TPF programmers are scarce and expensive.

GDSs see the use of hundreds of computers versus no more than a few big mainframe machines as offering more room for expansion.

Yet, the extent to which GDSs should move off the TPF is a matter of some debate. Research issued last month by Los Altos, Calif.-based International Technology Group found replacing all or part of the TPF can be risky at best.

GDSs have employed off-mainframe technology for many years. Their creation and/or purchase of corporate self-booking vendors and products is but one example. "You wouldn't build a GDS on TPF if you were starting it now," said Sue Powers, Worldspan senior vice president of worldwide product solutions. "We don't have a particular project to get rid of the TPF or even to keep it, but we are determining where each function needs to reside."

"There will always be a need for a high-speed core that may or may not be on the TPF mainframe," said Greg Webb, Sabre senior vice president of global product marketing. "Over time, we've wanted to make a transition from a transaction-based system to a customer-based one."

The most vocal GDS basher is airline-owned Orbitz, which is attacking GDS costs in defense against regulation. While Orbitz often omits its own reliance on the Worldspan GDS, it is Orbitz's use of Cambridge, Mass.-based ITA Software's fare searching technology that has attracted much attention. Not coincidentally, fare quoting and pricing are the functions GDSs have first moved to more flexible platforms.

Amadeus, which owns 20 percent of ITA, implemented ITA's software for U.S. domestic faring and now runs all of its worldwide pricing on machines that use the Unix operating system, according to director of technology and strategy Fred Bessis. Galileo also moved its North American faring to a Unix platform in December.

"The big benefits are flexibility and the lower cost of developing new faring categories," said Mickey Lutz, Galileo CIO. "What used to take months is now taking days. We can also load fares in minutes. This brought a return of millions."

For Sabre, the internally named Air Travel Shopping Engine sits on the Hewlett-Packard NonStop platform. Sabre will move all online customers by year-end, starting recently with one of the largest, Webb said. Offline subscribers are expected to be converted beginning at year-end.

The ePricing capability co-developed by Worldspan and Expedia allows searches of many more itineraries than before. Worldspan recently added to the mix comparisons with corporate negotiated fares. Like Sabre, however, the implementation thus far is limited, touching between 10 percent and 13 percent of domestic itineraries in recent weeks.

E-Travel, GetThere and others have popularized the notion of a super passenger name record, one that takes in data from the GDSs as well as other sources to create a record that can be changed using multiple channels. GDS officials said they already have a super PNR. "Sometimes it's convenient for a Web site or other third party to mix the GDS PNR information with theirs," Amadeus' Bessis said. "That doesn't mean the PNR is super. It's a buzzword."

Nevertheless, GDSs said they are opening up the PNR and traveler profiles to such additional channels as corporate booking tools by structuring their data to facilitate imports and exports or by migrating those functions off the TPF. With the proliferation of booking options, for example, data about travelers and their travels need to be synchronized in multiple places.

Bessis indicated that Amadeus is working to create a structured PNR in the mainframe that would be easier for other parties to communicate with, and that its off-TPF profile server took less than a year to develop. Webb said Sabre is "working with the largest agencies on the best way to expose profiles."

Powers said Worldspan is considering moving profiles off the TPF to enable them to better interact with such other information as corporate travel policies. Worldspan PNRs, however, will remain on the TPF for the time being.

Lutz said Galileo "has been moving profiles from the mainframe," but he spoke most boldly about the company's Web services effort.

GDSs traditionally facilitate communication between the TPF and other applications using proprietary application programming interfaces. The Web services concept, however, uses such common Internet languages as XML to save programming time and money for GDSs and their partners. Galileo's first customer on Web services is AAA. Lutz said many more customers will use the services in the next few months.

Amadeus said it has the Web services infrastructure in place but has not yet shared it with clients. Its E-Travel unit recently announced that online players now can use its Web services to integrate weather and aircraft information, airport guides and a currency converter—and soon, fares and flight information.

Another limitation of the mainframe TPF, Bessis said, is that it cannot support relational databases that suppliers want to use for customer history. All GDSs, he said, traditionally flush out PNRs after they are flown. Amadeus is developing a database with the history of PNRs. Sabre said it has built a customer data warehouse and soon will announce a relationship index that will give agents a view of all of a customer's flights.

Meanwhile, all GDSs are seeking to add new content for use by agents and travelers. Worldspan, for example, now is adding hotel pictures to its Web-based agent interface. Rental car pictures and mapping relative to hotel locations also are on the horizon. Amadeus has created a database with 400,000 points of interest for agents' reference.

"The GDSs have finally awakened to the fact that the demise of the GDSs as we know them today is virtually assured," said Richard Eastman, tech vendor and consultant with The Eastman Group in Newport Beach, Calif.

Others are not so sure.

Based on a survey of 14 global companies that use the TPF operating system, ITG questioned the cost and performance assumptions on which Sabre based its decision to migrate fare searching and potentially more functions to the HP NonStop servers.

"I don't see why customers should subsidize some programmers' preferences for what platform they want to work on," argued ITG managing director Brian Jeffrey. "These are some of the world's most difficult systems to operate, design and manage. No GDS has managed to pull more than even a small portion of the workload off the TPF. It's the one thing you should not try to migrate, and that's not just because it's difficult. It's also that the legacy architecture is more efficient for running that system."

"We don't put much weight in the report's findings," said a Sabre rep.

ITG did not reveal the names of its clients, which it said include software vendors and financial institutions. ITG frequently is cited on IBM's Web site. IBM developed the TPF system.