September 30, 2002 (Computerworld) --
When the first global distribution systems (GDS), such as American Airlines Inc.'s Sabre, came on the scene, they pioneered the use of computers in large-scale commercial applications and the network-based e-commerce we take for granted today. Sabre Holdings Corp. and its counterparts, such as Galileo International, Amadeus and WorldSpan, handled unprecedented volumes of data and transactions as they booked millions of airline flights, hotel rooms and car rentals worldwide. The rise of the Web has cost the GDSs much of their clout by providing a low-cost way for customers to access fare and other information. But how much blame should go to the GDSs for not moving more quickly to update the 1960s-era mainframe technology that's at the heart of their information systems? GDS critic and competitor Jeremy Wertheimer, president and CEO of ITA Software Inc., says the GDSs' core systems just aren't up to today's requirements. He says the PC-based technology on which ITA's pricing software runs (and which is used on the Orbitz.com travel-ticket Web site, among others) can scale more easily and less expensively than mainframes. "If you're trying to support many concurrent users over the Web, we can devote thousands of [low-priced computers] to that. In the mainframe context, you can't," says Wertheimer. Eventually, he says, the mainframe-based reservation and pricing systems "will fall over and be replaced." He also criticizes IBM's 1960s-era Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) operating system, which at the time was the first to handle large volumes of transactions (such as airfare searches) in real time. TPF is fundamentally unsuited to the number and type of complex, real-time fare calculations generated by consumers shopping on the Web, Wertheimer says. While travel agents, the traditional users of these systems before the Web, might sell one ticket for every five fare queries they made to the system, says Wertheimer, "it's nothing for a Web site to have 100 visitors [asking about fares] of whom 99 buy nothing." Wertheimer also claims that it's much easier to write complex operations, such as complicated fare comparisons, in modern programming languages than writing them to run under TPF. Craig Murphy, Sabre's chief technology officer, acknowledges that it's harder to program in TPF compared with more modern operating systems, but he says that's why Sabre is gradually moving from TPF to Unix-based systems that can be programmed in C++ and Java. When the switch over is complete in 2004, he says, the critical work of "pricing" tickets -- committing to a final price for the customer and assuming any costs if that price is wrong -- will fall to fault-tolerant NonStop servers from Hewlett-Packard Co. (The servers were formerly called
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