Plane sailing as Sita ditches 30-year-old mainframes

Airline industry IT body Sita is ditching 30-year-old mainframes as part of a plan to roll out a new reservations system.

The organisation has inked a 15-year deal with Oracle to update its Passenger Reservations System - which also covers ticketing, inventory and departure control - and forms part of its Horizon passenger management portfolio.

The reservations system will move from its current environment - a Fortran system running on Unisys mainframes - to a new SOA platform.

According to Michael Mitchell, Sita's VP for the Horizon Programme, the move prompted the inflexible nature of the old mainframe system and by the ageing of those with the skills to deal with it.

"It's a classic case of a legacy technology that was a fantastic workhorse for the industry but the industry now wants to be more customer-centric, it wants to be able to directly service consumers who make their bookings on airline websites and the nature of transaction has changed from the way they were 30 years ago," he told silicon.com.

According to Mitchell, the migration - its largest ever investment in a single project - is expected to cost around $100m.

"Putting new stuff on the old system… becomes a bigger and bigger compromise so we finally reached a point where we had to rearchitect and rebuild and we had to do that while our 138 airline customers continue to receive service," he added.

In order to bridge the incoming and outgoing systems, the passenger name record used by the legacy system will be transformed into 60 or 70 relational tables, which can then be accessed by the new part of the system.

The changeover, which could be complete in around five years, could pave the way for new functionality, including the ability for Sita's airline customers to resell third-party products.

The new Passenger Reservations System will make use of Oracle Database, Oracle Fusion Middleware, Oracle Business Intelligence for reporting and Oracle Identity Management for security.