Sabre used this year's STX London event, held at the Hilton Metropole, to showcase some of the latest technology it will be using to help customers create new products.
There was an emphasis on speed, and Mark McSpadden, Sabre's vice-president of digital experience, said: "What continues to amaze me isn't the pace that technology changes, it’s the rate at which we’re adopting it. There are 150-plus technologies in 2018, and we use all these to deliver products for customers. We have to stay updated on those."
Joe DiFonzo, chief information officer, added Sabre had to make sure “our products can bend” by moving its systems into a “hybrid cloud”. “We can share resources across different sectors. Sabre doesn’t make a lot of money as a data centre. We make it delivering services for you," he added.
Micro thinking
During the day, speakers hailed “micro services” as the next step. Citing a “DevOps” method of working, DiFonzo said “bite-services” could now be deployed anywhere and at anytime. “We’re getting out of [product release] cycles of 18-24 months, and working on two-week cycles. It opens up our products,” he said.
Meanwhile, opening its up own data meant that users can now scale faster and add new functionalities. “Sabre doesn’t need to write every line of code. How do we make it faster? These architectures let us do that. We’re also working on a new ‘unified architectural framework’, but it’s not live yet, with a public cloud and a private Sabre cloud.”
He said the strategy would let Sabre test products quickly and globally. “We’re not relying on our data centre in America. If you’re an airline in Australia, you use data that’s in Australia. That’s a key benefit,” he added. Other updates for customers included “continuous availability” capability, with operations safeguarded even if Sabre’s main Dallas data centre were to shut down.
Chatbots and artificial intelligence were also touched upon, and Sabre said it was trialling chatbots with two TMC clients. Travellers would be able to book and change flight tickets, order food and even request invoice copies via Facebook Messenger. If the system fails to understand a request, the query is then passed to an agent.
Next generation
In a later session session, Herve Couturier, chair of the technology committee of the board of directors and former executive vice-president, R&D, at Amadeus, said Sabre would spend $1 billion on technology this year.
“Sabre is a next-generation software house. It is investing 10-18% in R&D. The company has a unique value proposition with its platform; it’s an open platform. Sabre won’t solve the needs of airlines by itself,” he told delegates.
He also cited 5G and the Internet of Things (IoT) as the next disruptors travel faces. Autonomous driving would be impacted by the availability of the high-speed mobile 5G network, while a business case had yet to be found for IoT.