Originally Posted by
BF263533
Continental Sells System One CRS To Amadeus
Apr 28, 1995 Aviation Daily
Continental yesterday sold its System One computer reservations system to the European CRS company Amadeus Global Travel Distribution for cash and a 12.4% stake in Amadeus (DAILY, April 27). Continental, which will get at least one seat on the Amadeus board, declined to reveal how much money it will receive or the value of the System One liabilities Amadeus will absorb. In the complex, four-way transaction, finalized yesterday, Amadeus will acquire System One's CRS software and other ...
SystemOne is/was not SHARES. Also known s SODA (SystemOne direct Access), it was the CRS (Computerized Reservation System) portion of Eastern Airlines and primarily used by Travel Agencies. It was arguably the major driver behind Texas Air's (Lorenzo) acquisition of Eastern. It was during the heyday of CRS's when SABRE and Apollo were each cows for AA/UA respectively. Lorenzo hoped to capture part of that market share.
Eastern had a separate module of SystemOne for its PSS (Passenger Service System) used for the operation of the airline. An old timer EA acquaintance tells me, it's name was Falcon*. (*I have never been able to validate this name with a second source)
SHARES/Sonic was a home grown/in house system developed by (pre Lorenzo) Continental's - Mutual Computer Services division...later renamed CCS (Continental Computer Services). CCS and EASI (Eastern Automation Services Inc) were later (circa 1987) merged into SystemOne Corp. System One Corp operated as two divisions - Travel Agencies (which operated/maintained SODA) and Airlines (which operated SHARES and Falcon, until Eastern's demise) This division also serviced non-Continental SHARES customers (approx. 30 smaller carriers, the largest of which were US Air / America West and Alaska Airlines) aka SHARES-B. SystemOne Corp was acquired by EDS (Electronic Data Systems) in 1991, and brought most all of the employees over as well as the SystemOne and SHARES hosts The SystemOne agency side struggled along for several years until it was acquired by Amadeus (EDS and Continental were 2 of the 4 parties mentioned in "complex transaction" cited in the post above) . The airline side professional services and the SHARES host remained with EDS until 2008 when it was acquired by HP (Hewlett Packard) where it remains today. As noted, UA has access to the source code and is able to make changes, significantly reducing maintenance/operation costs.
While the
SHARES vs APOLLO article was good overall, this portion:
- Let's start with a bit of a background. Apollo started its life in the 1970s with United and over the years United owned it and maintained it. At around the same time, Eastern Airlines launched a platform named SystemONE (which later evolved into current day SHARES)
is just not factually accurate. SystemOne (Direct Access) that was sold to Amadeus is not, nor ever has been SHARES.