SITA creates R&D Facility for Aviation Technology Research

SITA, a leading airline-owned IT provider, has created SITA Lab, a facility for technology research whose declared goal is to drive innovation for the air transport industry working both independently and in partnership with others.

SITA's CEO, Francesco Violante, said, "The pace of change in developing technologies continues unabated from Web 2.0 to Cloud Computing to new mobile applications and virtualisation. The speed of new technology development requires a dedicated focus on how these technologies can be incorporated into SITA's portfolio of solutions for the Air Transport Industry."

SITA, which will spend $110 million this year on research and product development, is launching this new initiative to provide a facility outside of the normal business process where ideas can be tested through strategic technology research.

The SITA Lab will deploy an Innovation Knowledge Management system to support the generation, capture and evaluation of new ideas. The system will be open to employees, as well as customers and partners, in order to create an Innovation Ecosystem for the Air Transport Industry. The ideas that are deemed to have the highest potential impact on the ATI will be incubated within the SITA Lab using rapid prototyping and joint customer pilots on a per project basis, with the objective of creating new SITA products and services.

The Geneva-based facility will be under the leadership of SITA's Chief Technology Officer, Jim Peters, who said, "Emerging technology is now driven more and more by the digital lifestyle of today's consumer rather than by traditional business-focussed IT solutions.

"SITA needs to be continually watching and learning from what happens in the consumer digital market to understand key trends and to be able to adapt and adopt consumer-driven technologies to create innovative solutions which address air transport industry problems. That's at the heart of the thinking behind the creation of SITA Lab."

A recent example of research work at SITA includes the benchmarking of in-memory database technology for SITA's next-generation passenger management system. The results showed the ability to store and retrieve Customer Journey records at throughput ten times greater than the existing mainframe capacity using standard servers running the Open Source operating system Linux. SITA Lab will build on a tradition of innovation at SITA, which has included the introduction of the first common use airport systems, the first online airline booking engine, and the recent development of in-flight mobile connectivity.

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