Galileo Gears Up For Future

<H1>Galileo Gears Up For Future</H1><H2>Fixes Computers To Read 21st Century Dates</H2><H3>By Cheryl Rosen</H3><I>Madrid </I>Imagine the ramifications to the travel industry if one day all round-trip airline tickets showed up in the CRS as one-ways, all credit cards came up as expired and all quality control and management reporting systems failed.

That might sound like a B-movie, but it's a rather accurate vision of the computer industry's nightmare, and a scenario it is working hard to avoid as we approach the year 2000.

At Galileo's international conference (see adjacent story), systems development senior vice president Jim Lubinski called upon all members of the travel industry to give serious thought to the state of their systems as "the biggest event of our lifetime" approaches.

With "only 190 weekends and 956 days" left to rectify a problem that will cost $300 billion to fix, Lubinski reminded all those who depend upon computers-especially mainframe computers-that "now is the time to start talking to critical suppliers" and developing Project 2000 initiatives.

"Feb. 4, 1999 is the most feared date in the travel industry-because that's the day you can begin booking for the year 2000," Lubinski said. "For multinational agencies, this will impact management information systems, back-office systems, quality control, in-house software. They need to act now."

At Galileo, a Project 2000 team will spend between $25 and $30 million preparing for the 21st century, including a complete inventory of all software products and talks with all national distribution companies and suppliers.

Most of the problems stem from the fact that older computers focus only on the last two digits of the year. The computer reads Jan. 1, 2000 as "00," and then sorts those dates as coming before "99." While most computers and software bought after 1996 already are "year-2000 compliant," Lubinski said, those that are not will fail.

Others in the travel industry shared Lubinski's concerns, although they noted that many suppliers already have begun to address the problem.

"I've been seeing white papers about this for three years, but I'm really amazed at how close we've gotten to the year 2000 without addressing the issue," said John Shoolery, chairman of software developer TravelNet Inc. of Sunnyvale, Calif. As a relatively new company, TravelNet "came out of the box compliant," he said. "But I feel for mainframe-based companies. I expect to see solutions, but in some cases there will have to be major rewrites of source code."

On the plus side, Shoolery added, the need for compliance "may prove a deciding factor in a decision to move to newer technologies, and that bodes well for us. But it doesn't come without pain."

Technology developer Richard Eastman of Newport Beach, Calif., agreed that the issue looms large for older, mainframe-based companies, and less so for the vendors with whom travel agencies and corporations deal.

"Like the Internet, the year 2000 makes good press because it is a big unknown," he said. "The issue isn't that older systems cannot be fixed-it's that there are bits and pieces of code that have never been looked at other than by the guy who created the initial program, and layers of subsequent enhancements have been built on top, to the point where the original code is virtually hidden from view. The problem lies in how to manage disaster control if surface changes impact some piece of buried code. The level of potential that has to bring a big system down is truly unknown."

Indeed, Galileo is not alone among the CRSs in tackling the problem. At Worldspan, a two-year-old Project 2000 team already has fixed the system that tracks customer contracts, which span five years, and the CRS expects to be fully compliant by the end of 1998, said product marketing vice president Sue Powers.

"Travel managers don't need to panic over this," she said, "but they do need to begin to look at it now, rather than in December 1999. They need to be proactive, to inventory their software and work to get assurances from vendors that the software will continue to work."

At Sabre, the issue, and the cost of fixing it, looms even larger. "It's a big issue not just for us, but for American Airlines and Canadian Airlines and 250 other clients that use our software," said Sabre Decision Technologies president Tom Cook. "Some systems that are old and have a lot of patches we'll just replace; the others we'll send through a process that finds the errors, fixes them, tests the changes and certifies that they are fixed."

The cost of all this is typically borne by the owner of the system, Cook said, and changes "should be virtually transparent to travel agencies and corporate travel buyers."

To help offset that cost, SDT will turn entrepreneurial, sharing its experience by offering consulting services to others striving to become year-2000 compliant.