From
http://www.starallianceemployees.com/
In a global airline alliance with 27 members, hundreds of thousands of electronic messages get passed from carrier to carrier every day, supporting general operations and every aspect of the passenger experience, from the time they select flights and book to the moment they leave the airport at their chosen destination.
Star Alliance information technology facilitates this exchange by helping the disparate member carriers’ IT systems to “talk” to each other. StarNet, created in 2000, is essentially a message translation and routing system for Alliance airlines, that ensures carrier A can read messages sent by carrier B, even though their home operating systems and data formats may be different.
StarNet in its current form supports two applications: RAS (Redemption Availability and Sell) and FLIFO (real-time flight information).
The first new application to run on StarNet Next Gen will be a IATCI hub supporting through-checkin for passengers travelling on two or more member carriers in a single journey. This IATCI hub (Inter-Airline Through-CheckIn hub) will remove the need for Star Alliance member carriers to maintain bilateral network connections and software with each of the other carriers to support such travel. This will reduce major overhead in terms of changes and testing of these systems, as currently any change at a single carrier can trigger adjustments at all the other 26 partners. It will also make joining Star Alliance easier for new entrants.
Current project timescales are for delivery of the new core hub and the IATCI application by March, 2012 and the RAS and FLIFO applications by August, 2012.