Sabre launches new reservations system

June 6, 2000 (Computerworld)

DALLAS -- At a conference here for users of Sabre Inc.'s centralized reservations system, Sabre and Sun Microsystems Inc. yesterday announced the development of the company's first new reservations engine since 1992.
Sabre's designers promised that the Java-based platform will be compatible with almost any operating system or browser, including Unix, for the first time. They also said the addition of HTML support will make the reservations system Internet-friendly, enabling the client software to be run as an applet on Web browsers.
Based in Forth Worth, Texas, Sabre has built its entire business around a system called Qik-Access, which handles reservations for 52 airlines and tens of thousands of travel agencies. It first launched the DOS-based Qik-1 in 1988 and then announced Qik-2 four years later with support for operating systems such as Windows and OS/2.
The release of Qik-3 marks a significant change for Sabre. The new reservations engine is designed for a heterogeneous computing world in which Sabre won't do anywhere near the amount of technological hand-holding it once did for airlines and other users of the system.
"On the travel agency side, we traditionally supplied the hardware to run the platform," said Scott Frederick, Sabre's development director for Qik-Access Systems. "Now agencies buy their own hardware, and we need to make sure our products still run on whatever they're using."
Frederick said Sabre chose Sun and its Java applications for "portability" reasons. "We had multiple versions of the source code for different (operating systems before)," he said. "Now we have one code for all of them. It's much simpler to support."
In order to build the new system, which will handle the bulk of the more than 30 million reservations that Sabre processes each year, Frederick's team of C++ programmers was given new Java training. Meanwhile, Sun provided system engineers to work on the project.
Airlines and travel agencies should now be able to run reservation centers with as many as 1,000 workers using either a traditional PC network or a Web-based setup that involves thin-client desktop devices, Sabre said. For users who choose the latter approach, Sabre plans to offer application-hosting services.
New graphical user interfaces included with the system will let Qik-3 users reconfigure and customize screens and business rules, according to Sabre officials. The client code can be run as an applet on a Web browser, they said.
Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Inc. was one of the companies that beta-tested Qik-3. To run the new reservations engine, Southwest converted from a Windows-based internal system to a Unix-powered one. It now plans to start using Qik-3 to process reservations from its 6,500 agents, said Dee Dahlstrom, Southwest's development group leader on the project.
Dahlstrom said the airline is also looking into using the new Sabre system to create a data warehouse of passenger records as well as a separate database that would keep track of customers who buy large amounts of tickets.
Christopher Serafin, vice president of applications development at Sabre, said XML support will be added to Qik-3 in the future -- a move he said should enable Sabre to fold in capabilities for booking reservations with smaller airlines and with businesses such as golf courses and limousine services.