Paul Revel talks to Sabre’s technology chief Robert Wiseman about sexy science and a super-fast future
I meet Robert Wiseman in the bar of the Radisson Blu in the historic Polish city of Krakow, where several of Sabre’s top brass have gathered to meet international journalists during a two-day conference at the tech giant’s research headquarters.
We are talking shortly after the Sabre chief technology officer (CTO) gave an eye-opening presentation that vividly illustrated the fast-flowing environment of computer technology. By 2038, it seems, a US$1,000 computer is projected to have the same processing speed as the human brain (1015 CPS – calculations per second). Internet network speeds are also looking exciting – 1Tb (trillion bits) per second by 2020. And storage is, in Wiseman’s words, getting “sexy” – Harvard scientists are storing data on DNA strands, while spintronics aligns electrons to store binary code. So how does that work? He laughs: “I can say the words – I don’t actually understand them.”
In his presentation, he aptly quotes classic sci-fi author Arthur C Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
EARLY DAYS
Raised in Barnsley, on leaving school Wiseman started work at the local steelworks, then worked in his father’s grocery shop before going to technical college in Leeds, to learn computer operating. “It was around 1978, nobody really knew what computers were. I’d never seen one before”
He got his first computer job in Sheffield. “It’s funny because Sheffield is 15 miles from my house, and people said: ‘Couldn’t you find anything closer?’ They couldn’t believed I actually travelled so far to get to work.” After automating the company’s operations in his first year, he was offered a programming role.
He then answered a job advert in the US – “I always wanted to go to America” – and was soon in management, and then consultant roles. His first stint with Sabre was in 1985, followed by consulting roles at Pan Am, IBM and Galileo. He worked at Delta for six years, in charge of Delta.com. “It was originally called Delta-air.com,” he smiles. “They wouldn’t spend the US$25,000 to buy the domain name – but they spent a lot more in the end.”
While breaking new ground with the airline’s website, did they foresee how the internet would change the whole business landscape? “Those of us who lived and breathed it, we saw this was how business was going to get done, but we thought the combination with bricks-and-mortar was going to be the thing. We envisaged a Barnes & Noble model [the US book retailer that combines upscale stores with online sales] – we didn’t guess at the pure online players like Amazon. But we planned for double growth and things kept picking up: my time at Delta.com saw annual online revenue growfrom US$300 million to US$1 billion.”
Before taking up the CTO post at Sabre in 2006, Wiseman’s high-profile tech roles included a stint as senior vice-president at online travel agency Orbitz, ironically “in charge of GDS [global distribution system] bypass – the direct connect stuff. And we got it working, but I could see it was a clumsy solution.”
How does he think the breath-taking evolution of computer capabilities will impact on travel management? “The faster the tech, the more data you can store, the more you’ll be able to do,” says Wiseman. “But there’s always a balance between getting the right data and best information – at the lowest price and fastest speed. We’re working on some really cool stuff right now at Sabre that’s going to reduce the time a lot. I think as machines and networks get faster the experience will become richer – with big data you’ll be able to pull together a lot of pertinent information. There will be better predictive analysis – pre-priced options based on the understanding of the current situation and past history. As costs come down those will become much more viable.”
THE MORE YOU HAVE...
Does the spectacular plummet in data storage costs (see Databank, p20) mean opportunities for massive profits for the technology companies? “No – because with any technology, the more you’ve got the more you use, and there’s never quite enough of it. Remember when you had a 56k modem – you thought it would be great if you had twice as much. The more you’ve got, the more stuff you want to shove down that pipe. For us it’s really about cost containment – customers expect more and more options, and we have to deliver those without making it more expensive.”
He says it takes big investment to be at the leading edge of travel technology. “We spend a lot of money and time working with partners like Intel, HP andOracle. We have a good symbiotic relationship, where they respect who Sabre is – you know, 80,000 transactions a second, 1 billion API [applicationprogramming interface] calls a day, running 24/7. These are critical transactions – if they go down it’s a big deal. So they know that we’re a good target for them to design their systems towards. So we have very close meetings with these guys – it helps both of us.”
Talking of critical transactions, I ask him about the widely reported system outage in September this year. “The longest 41 minutes of my life,” he says. “We’re all there getting systems back up and running, because we know it has a global impact. The data was quickly redistributed and servers were soon back up – but it’s not something we ever want to happen again.”
He says his “SWAT team” is always on standby if there’s a problem – but critical problems are extremely rare as all products are tested to destruction in the company’s massive performance labs before going into production. “Stability is the most important thing for us – that’s why we’ve got a good record.”
Also part of his job as CTO is an “enterprise role” overseeing the four divisions: Sabre Hospitality, Sabre AirlineSolutions, Sabre Travel Network and Travelocity/Lastminute.com. This includes ensuring they are sharing (and not duplicating) research and development.
So how does he see Sabre’s role in the future of buying corporate travel? “Some of the tech advances, such as ‘big data’, and vastly cheaper and faster memory, will create opportunities that previouslydidn’t exist. We say to our developers: ‘Don’t inhibit yourself based on how much something costs now; imagine it costs nothing – what kind of applications and capabilities would you design for Sabre?’ We design systems now for two, three or four years out.”
He quotes Canadian ice-hockey legend Wayne Gretzky. “When he was asked why he was such a great player, he replied: ‘I always went to where the puck was going, rather than where the puck was.’ That’s the approach we take. As we’re looking to the future, we start to design for where technology is going to be, not necessarily where it is today.”