Altea Outage in OZ - Long Term Impact?

Qantas, the first user of the full Altea airline reservation system suite from Amadeus, suffered a major outage (as it turned out "outages" is more accurate as it kept going up and down) on 3 Jan 2010. This follows a separate outage in September and a "meltdown" in November as reported by the main Sydney newspaper. This outage apparently continued on Jan 6th. Of course no official word on the outage on the QF website. A spokesman for QF claimed that there was intermittent outages for about an hour.

There is a good synopsis from Tim Hughes. The approach taken by Tim indicates how the attitude of the regime change (from old school Dixon) to the current team (ex-Jetstar Irishman Joyce) will affect the future of the mainline airline. With QF now open to foreign investment (under the terms of the recent Australian Government White Paper on Aviation) the winds of change are now likely to sweep in.

So if I may I will pick up on the point Tim was making. QF is heading down a very different path than the one outlined by Geoff Dixon and we can be assured that the old cronyism of the dominant market player is not likely to be tolerated by Joyce and his team. However whether the rank and file get that is another matter. Clearly the customer service functions were clearly unprepared for it and the event went from bad to worse. The twitterhea that ensued was ample to say the least.

I will draw the analogy between Ryanair (that moves a heck of a lot more passengers) who handled multiple outages in August of 2010 including peak times and how they dealt with the problems and QF. I fully accept that FR is a different animal. But they coped with the issues and moved their passengers efficiently.

For Amadeus - not everyone is smiling - this must be a big black eye. QF has been their shining example how well they do. Altea has many issues not least of which is the time taken to implement and the cost of the system - both in operating costs and implementation costs. I have spoken to several airlines who went through the pain of the cutover process and almost all have been less than enthusiastic about how it went. Again we know that it is a very unpleasant experience going through that cutover process. I have personally lived and worked on two major res system cutovers. They are a nightmare. For potential users of Amadeus Altea Suite - even some who have already signed up - there is a lot of disquiet about the whole process. Given the hiccups that occurred in November and December with TAM, they are right to go back and make sure that all the contingency plans are in place. Some airlines are seriously thinking of running for the hills though!

For QF and Amadeus - I see some of this wind of change occurring sooner rather than later. Amadeus can kiss goodbye any chance it had of capturing Jetstar. Amadeus will not be quite so central to their future and QF will likely start to cast its net a little wider to other systems to help it transform from the legacy and stodgy old line business of the former regime into a much more nimble player. CEO Alan Joyce has made no bones about the fact that QF mainline must shape up or the routes will go to Jetstar. Amadeus should be under no illusions that it affects them too.

Now they have a lot of repair work to do.

Cheers

With special thanks to the SMH and DT.com.au for the images

No Secret Any More - AC Cans Polaris PSS

The slow painful lack of progress with the Air Canada Reservations Project known as Polaris has come to a dead stop with AC writing off C$67 million. More importantly the depth of the work left to do was an astonishing C$40 million. This clearly indicates that the project was no where near done. Even if you discount a large amount of money for implementation, there is a clear indication that this project had some significant hills to climb to reach an "implementable" solution. Sadly ITA software is left without its anchor customer for what is a significant amount of their future revenue expectation.

And the big winner in all this?

Amadeus?

Once again carrying all before it - Amadeus is fast becoming the only game in town for large scale reservations systems PSS. ....Well maybe not.... Amadeus has many problems of its own with the UAL implementation not making any visible progress. There are now some pretty good alternatives for large scale legacy airlines.

Mature solutions are from: Mercator (the core system of Emirates and several other airlines), itself an adaptation of the old Swissair Atrraxis system.
SabreSonic (as deployed at AA and many other carriers) the latest iteration of the venerable system from Sabre.
Horizon (although I am sure that I will get flamed by SITA who think its a brand new system)
EDS-Shares - Continental, Virgin Atlantic and US Airways are the biggest users.

There are some good solutions at the lower level of LCC and simple carrier level - such as Navitaire New Skies and Results or TikSystems (Amadeus's newest best friend).

Still trying to make headway are Unisys's Air Core, and IBS's solution.

The market for PSSs remains in churn with some big contracts still up for grabs. Lufthansa's exit from the market has left a hole. The cooperation between UA and CO should be interesting and we will be keeping an eye on this. They might yet decide to go to something different away from Altea. For sure there are a lot of people making trips to Chicago and Houston!

Actually there is one certified winner in this. IBM who managed to stay behind the scenes and retain the value of their relationship with AC. Couple this with the recent outsourcing of many of QF's IT functions to the Software and Services Giant and the boys in Armonk must be smiling.

For the rest - stay tuned.

Westjet FINALLY chooses its Next Gen PSS

After first choosing not to stay with Navitaire (its current provider) then selecting AiRes but abandoning that choice - Westjet took a hard look at all of their options. The 2 finalists were Sabre with its tarted up Sabre Sonic CSS and Amadeus Altea/Pioneer hybrid.

The envelope please - Sabre wins.

Actually I am surprised Given that Frontier already looked at the issue and decided that SSCSS didn't hack it for them. Maybe Sabre offered them some special secret source.

For Amadeus - it might be a final nail in the coffin for Pioneer which has been a bit of a dud in the market.

For Navitaire who had hoped to hang on - it must be a bit of a blow. Esp since Volaris is retaining NewSkies.

Exciting times for all

MAS goes with SITA

Bucking the trend of Amadeus winning everything, Malaysian Airlines System has gone with SITA’s revamped Horizon product for PSS, DCS etc. Saudi Arabian Airlines however stayed with the mob and went to Altea. In both cases they previously had their own res system. MAS is currently a user of the old Atraxis system aka Swissair’s TPF or ALCS. This week saw the end of Iris – Varig’s old Atraxis host. This leaves very few customers – TAP and Brussels along with Swiss and Emirates.

Cheers.