Oracle and SITA Partner to Build Next Gen Airline Reservations System

Oracle, one of the world’s largest business software companies, and SITA, an aviation IT specialist, have signed a 15-year agreement to develop what they call "the most open and agile airline reservations system ever designed", using service oriented architecture (SOA) and advanced computing techniques.

Francesco Violante, SITA CEO, said, “SITA’s strategic technology partnership with Oracle is a major milestone in the development of our Horizon passenger management portfolio and will have a profound impact on the airline industry. It is putting the most advanced technology stack available at the service of our industry for the first time. Advanced technology is essential to the modernization of the airline reservations systems of our 138 airline customers and we expect many others will be attracted to Horizon by the success of the project.”

The partnership is already set to bear fruit with the launch next month by SITA of Customer Journey, a Horizon feature providing real-time access to airline bookings for business intelligence applications and rapid retrieval of customer journey records across multiple search criteria.

Loic Le Guisquet, Oracle Executive Vice President for Europe, Middle East and Africa, said, “This is a tremendous opportunity for Oracle and SITA to work together on one of the biggest IT modernization projects ever, implementing top quality design on a state-of-the-art architecture. This project will demonstrate Oracle’s capacity to provide a full technology stack to modernize legacy applications in order to produce true SOA-enabled applications with very high transaction-processing capabilities.

“SITA is a strong strategic partner for Oracle and will be represented on the Oracle CIO Advisory Board and Customer Advisory Board with access to Oracle Labs and the Oracle Excellence Centre for co-innovation programmes.”

SITA is making its largest-ever single project investment in the further development of its Horizon platform which involves a team of 400 software engineers and designers - including off-shore resources - spread across the globe. The implementation approach favours gradual migration of standard industry processes and selected innovative enhancements.

This approach enables SITA to develop highly flexible solutions as airlines migrate from today’s mainframe technology to SOA open systems supported by Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Business Intelligence for advanced reporting capacity and Oracle Identity Management for security. SITA will also enjoy direct access to Oracle development resources, best practice advice and new versions of software over the next 15 years.

The new SITA Passenger Reservations System will cover Reservations, Inventory, Ticketing and Departure Control and will be completed progressively over the next five years following releases in 2009. SITA’s overall business goals are to extend the scope of the Horizon platform to increase airline profitability, enhance customer centricity and self-service, optimize distribution and create actionable business intelligence.

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