Leading Airline Software Maker Boosts Competitiveness, Cuts Development Time Up

“We achieved an architecture that has instant credibility with our customers. We have a crisp message about meeting industry standards and aligning with Microsoft’s long-term product direction.”

Todd Iversen, Product Marketing Director, Sabre Airline Solutions

Executives at Sabre Airline Solutions wanted to improve their key product for both their customers and developers. Through engagements at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC), Sabre gained those benefits and more, such as launching a mobile version of the solution 50 percent sooner and gaining services Sabre values at U.S.$400,000. Further, the MTC helped Sabre boost its competitiveness.

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Document published May 2006

Business Needs

More than 200 airlines use decision-support tools from Sabre Airline Solutions to help increase revenues and improve operations, making the company the world’s largest provider of such software—and the company's executives naturally want that number to go up.

As part of its effort to maintain and increase its market share, Sabre sought to update its popular Streamline™ Resource Management Suite, an end-to-end solution to improve day-to-day airport operations by providing optimal staffing levels, generating employee rosters, automating employee administration, and offering decision support for daily operations.

The challenges for the software developers at Sabre were two-fold: First, how would it be possible to cut time-to-market for the new solution, to maintain and build on the company’s market leadership? Second, how could they mitigate the risk of re-architecting the solution to align with Microsoft’s product direction—the direction that the company’s customers wanted for their own operations?

The pre-existing solution was based on an earlier generation of Microsoft® technology and software development tools, including C++ code, and a client/server architecture. Sabre management hoped that updating the solution by employing the Microsoft Visual Studio® 2005 development system, the Microsoft .NET Framework version 2.0, and a distributed, Web-based architecture would reduce calls to a Sabre customer’s database, thereby minimizing the amount of bandwidth on the customer’s network. They also believed that this would relieve Sabre's developers of the burden of continual maintenance, freeing them to innovate new functionality, respond to customer needs, and speed time-to-market.

Solution

Sabre developers worked closely with a Microsoft developer and platform evangelist, in late 2004 and early 2005, to understand the Microsoft product plan and its relevance for the continued development of Streamline.

Sabre developers then participated in a three-week engagement at the Microsoft Technology Center (MTC) in Austin, Texas, in the spring of 2005.

At the start of a five-day architecture design session, Sabre and Microsoft personnel spent three days reviewing the existing Streamline architecture, the migration objectives, and the Sabre skill sets needed for implementation.

In the final two days of the architecture design session, Microsoft architects recommended best practices for development and identified.NET technologies to replace outdated components. The Sabre and Microsoft team then went into a 14-day proof of concept (POC), updating the solution with .NET technologies and recompiling it. The result was a working model of the updated solution.

“The engagement was very hands-on, very productive,” recalls Abdul Akbari, Principal Software Developer, Sabre Software Solutions. “We’d be drained at the end of each day—but that’s good. We were working on our own code base right away, not looking at samples or listening to lectures.”

The MTC engagement helped Akbari and colleagues John Cheng and Rajesh Kumar to use:

Application blocks to speed development.

Microsoft ADO.NET for a database-neutral architecture that would enable Sabre customers who are migrating from Oracle to Microsoft SQL Server™ to continue to use the Streamline solution.

Smart-client technology that works in online or offline mode, to address the bandwidth-consumption issue and enable a mobile solution.

For its mobility solution, Sabre developed another POC with the assistance of consultants for Microsoft Services on site at Sabre. The developers then returned to the MTC to further refine and expand Streamline’s .NET-connected architecture.

Benefits

The MTC engagements exceeded Sabre expectations for speeding time-to-market, cutting the cost of development, mitigating the risk of re-architecting its product, and increasing Sabre competitiveness. Sabre introduced both a .NET-connected Streamline product and a mobility product that enables airport employees to access Streamline wherever they are.

Additional benefits derived from the MTC sessions were:

Before, Sabre development staff had estimated two years to produce a .NET-connected version of the Streamline suite—but within three months, the first part of that solution was delivered to market. Sabre Product Marketing Director Todd Iversen estimates the value of the MTC engagement to Sabre at U.S.$400,000.

The knowledge gained at the MTC and follow-up activities helped to cut development time and related costs for the mobility solution as well—by 35 to 70 percent, shaving three months and $75,000 off the budget.

Iversen credits the MTC with being a catalyst for change and momentum for the Streamline team. “The MTC gave us the opportunity to step outside of our daily activities, to rigorously test hypotheses, to gain clarity around our long-term plans, to prioritize tasks, and to make the future happen,” advises Iversen. “It also showed us we could upgrade our solution in steps, at our own pace, rather than having to do everything at once.”

“Our competitiveness has noticeably improved as our vision has so much more substance and conviction behind it,” notes Iversen. “We achieved an architecture that has instant credibility with our customers. We have a crisp message about meeting industry standards and aligning with Microsoft’s long-term product direction.”

Iversen sees the benefits of the MTC engagements extending for years. “Thanks to the great people we worked with at the MTC, we have Microsoft contacts we can turn to for years to come,” he observes.