British Airways has finally ended speculation today about
the future of their TPF Reservations and support systems. For at
least 7-9 months they have been considering options for the future
maintenance, control and develoment of this area of their IT programme.
It quickly became clear that although BA had announced to their staff that
they were still considering the option of retaining control of their TPF
systems, that they were in fact determined to outsource.
The two bidders to take on this highly complex project were AMADEUS and
SABRE. AMADEUS were thought to be underdogs at first because of
their lack of experience in Airline hosting on their relatively young
system in Erding, Germany. SABRE were the acknowledged leaders in
the airline multi-hosting business, leveraging the power and reputation of
the SABRE CRS complex and the long history of innovation and financial
strength that has been admired well beyond the historically closed world
of airline systems.
It has emerged unofficially that one of the deciding factors in BA's
decision was AMADEUS' wish to form a collaborative partnership to take
BA's IT requirements forward versus the perception that SABRE wished to
remain more on a Supplier/Customer footing, It had also been
rumoured that SABRE had yet to provide a suitable approach to some of the
staffing issues and particularly trades union involvement. It
had been generally agreed that there was little to choose between the two
technical proposals, although on BA's internal rating system for comparing
the bids it has been revealed that AMADEUS consistently edged their more
experienced rivals in the opinion of BA's technical and management team.
There now begins a period of 'Due Diligence' where the AMADEUS team
will work with BA to flesh-out the agreement in principle. This is
expected to take approximately 12 weeks, after which the parties plan to
sign an official contract committing AMADEUS to provide the in-scope IT
functionality for BA for a 10 year period.
