Travelport Consolidates Data Operations In Atlanta Center
Travelport GDS today announced it has completed the consolidation of the global data centers for its global distribution and airline IT hosting systems into its Atlanta data-operations headquarters.
Travelport GDS president and CEO Gordon Wilson said the data systems consolidation has cut in half shopping and fare retrieval response times for its GDS and airline reservation systems.
"People that use corporate online booking tools, for example, will notice that change," Wilson told Business Travel News last week. "Fare results will be coming back much faster and so will the corporate travel agencies, whether they are doing queries or are offering a reprice or pricing an itinerary. All of that is happening significantly faster in the system than it was previously."
Wilson also said that the completion of the massive consolidation puts more of a focus on the company's products like its agent point-of-sale desktop, scheduled to roll out in the first quarter of next year, this quarter's implementation of Worldspan's e-pricing shopping capability into the Galileo GDS and the later launch of a booking product for unmanaged business travelers and small and midsize enterprises.
"When you have been doing a lot of integration work, inevitably you've been consolidating onto one in terms of some of the applications that we use, but we are much more heavily involved in investments in improving or augmenting products," he said. "Having the systems side by side makes the sharing of components much easier and faster to achieve."
The data center consolidation, which included the migration of more than 50 million passenger reservations from Denver to Atlanta, went live in the last weekend in September, said Wilson. Over a five-year period, Worldspan had invested $450 million on the technology infrastructure in Atlanta and Travelport GDS sank another $60 million into it this year.
The Atlanta center now processes 1.2 billion transactions daily and 20,000 transactions per second at the peak of the business day for the Galileo, Apollo and Worldspan GDS cores and for several major carriers including United Airlines and Atlanta-based Delta Air Lines. The existing Denver data center will be maintained as a data disaster recovery location.
Amadeus has operated a consolidated data processing location in Erding-Aufhausen, Germany, since its inception, according to Amadeus North America COO Scott Gutz.
"We always felt that the most cost-efficient, secure, reliable and the best opportunity to provide service to our customers would be to actually host all of our technology solutions in one core location," said Gutz. "The only thing that has taken place in parallel, as we have acquired new companies and won over new airline IT contracts, is we have actually gone through migration periods to get existing hosting solutions that particular countries offered in to migrate to a common technology stack and then to move all of the hosting operations to Germany."