Rumor: CO computer system to survive post-merger
 

I have heard some unconfirmed reports that the decision has been made to retain the legacy CO platform (SHARES) as the computer system for the merged UA. I can't say I am well-versed in the area, so I'm not sure what sort of repercussions that move will have on the customer-facing IT platform, such as for the website or kiosks. The decision clearly bodes well for CO agents who won't have to learn another lan"GG"uage after Customer Day 1.

Any thoughts?

RIP Apollo
 

Rest in peace Apollo. We will miss you.

Heck, I already missed United... something bitter about the Continental COol Aid. :mad:

Not a rumor. It was a rumor for the last few months, but was confirmed yesterday.

They confirmed most of the tech systems across all the divisions from bag processing, reservations, gate processing, sales, revenue management, HR, crew scheduling...


A hodgepodge of systems from both. Truly a "merger of equals".

I would HATE to work on the IT integration team the next year or so...looks like some MAJOR headaches for some techies.

"GG" has been dead since fastair came out like 13ish years ago, unless you worked in some backend support offices. UA has used a GUI based system that automates all the "GG" and other cs/res functions since then (1st was fastres for reservations, then was fastair for airport CS.)

I wouldnt get too excited on this one if true SHARES is sticking around..and i'll belive it when it happens. It is the most outdated system out there, even more then UA's.

And this IT intergration will not be a year..it will be yearS.

Much of the bad IROP service on CO vs the realvietly good on UA goes direclty back to SHARES.

+1

You cannot underestimate the behavioral impact of these things. If it takes an agent 10 minutes to do a ticket reissue, they're going to be less inclined to rebook someone on something requiring a ticket reissue.

That said, I'm not surprised by this. While Apollo was clearly the superior system, it came with license fees, which I believe CO does not have with SHARES.

Honestly, this is looking more and more like the US-HP merger. US kept HP's SHARES system, HP's CEO, and US's name.

I think you hit the nail on the head. They didn't give reasons as to why which system(s) won out over the others, but without question, Apollo, while archaic, is massively more developed, with much greater processing power and redundant systems. But of course, SHARES is the cheaper one.

While cash is king, so too is the inverse, cost, the anti-king. Just look at AA with Orbitz and the ruling yesterday that allowed AA to pull out of Orbitz listings. It didn't take them even a day once given permission to be off. AA isn't pulling a WN by refusing to be sold by other sites than aa.com, they are just eliminating one channel that charges them fees.

I totally agree on this point. Good or bad what essentially happend is CO is taking over UA and they had to pitch it as a "merger" for all intnese and purposes. It is very quickly evolving into UA run by CO. You just have to look at the tail of the plains to know that.

I was never a big UA supporter but given the direction CO has been going in under the latest managment, i'm not so sure how this will turn out in the end.

DL nailed their merger for the most part but i'm already starting to see UA/CO are not following a similar path unless things change.

this must be another one of those "Changes we think you'll like" situations. :rolleyes:

Had I been running the helm, I would have gone with UA's system and CO's website as the surviving platforms for the merged carrier.

But again, what do I know :p

It is indicative of the short-term focus of the Smisek team that they chose to go with SHARES because it is less expensive to operate than Apollo despite clear evidence that Apollo is the more efficient system.

In my opinion, a more long-term oriented team would have chosen the more robust system to provide employees a better platform and customers a better experience.

But as we all know by now, SMisek and his team are not as concerned about employees and customers in the short-term as they are about shareholder value.

SHARES is vastly inferior to UA's airport-side IT infrastructure.

Rebooking and reissuing a ticket is super-easy in UA's system, CO's is a nightmare. As channa said, ease-of-use affects the willingness of agents to re-issue tickets in IRROPS. It takes a CO agent 10 minutes to do what takes a UA agent 20 seconds. If they can port the UA interface to CO's backend I suppose it would work fine.

Also, doing VDBs is a piece of cake in UA's system, CO takes a lot longer. I guess in that situation they gotta do it either way but in a situation where they need to get the flight out and there is a rebookable flight leaving soon it can make a difference.

So I've heard that development time on SHARES is an order of magnitude quicker than on Apollo. I wonder if (1) they've chosen SHARES so that they can get the combined system on much earlier; and (2) are planning to migrate to the StarNet system once the next release is available

Isn't that what they're ultimately supposed to be concerned about?

That's a nice thought, but speaking as someone who does IT integrations, that's ALWAYS (and rightfully so) a secondary consideration in major mission-critical integrations. A competent IT team can always port-over or cook up new interfaces to make employees' & customers' tasks easier when there is a smoothly functioning back-end in place. But you never want to create a more complicated or task-disruptive integration project than you have to, especially to preserve a user-level feature, because it's like building your beautiful house on a foundation of sand...

This is, of course, assuming that the CO/UA integration team IS competent. And that may not be a fair assumption... For reference, see the DL/NW Deltamatic/PARS integration. That not only failed to keep the best of either world during the transition itself, but actively made it impossible for customers OR employees to do their jobs in the short-term... They've still not recovered certain widely-popular features more than a year after primary integration.

The one thing I can say, from a user-level, about CO's IT team is that they've generally been very good about cranking out tools on the website and in other systems to help ease processes. And they're not overly-afraid to release highly-useful tools, even if they have some known bugs that have to be refined over time. The best we can probably hope for is that things won't get WORSE in the short-term. And after primary integration, they'll bring those past skills to bear restoring some of the better UA user-level features on top of the merged ops-level base.

Not if it causes long-term share value declines, right?

[QUOTE=CJ1120;15502922(2) are planning to migrate to the StarNet system once the next release is available[/QUOTE]

"StarNet" is not a reservations sytem. It is essentially a hub that allows the Star Alliance partners to connect with each other. You may be thinking about the Altea platform by Amadeus. This is a reservations and departaure control system by Amadeus that many Star carriers use.

UA has had a long running project to covert to Altea for the last 7 years that was essentially cancled a couple of years ago.

UA will eventualy have to covert to next generation HP/Sabre/or Amadeus solution but i doubt that has been decided what the long term choice will be.

Both CO and UA had previously announced their intentions to migrate to a new reservations platform before the merger was finalized (http://www.flyertalk.com/forum/conti...-platform.html). Might not be called StarNet but I believe that's what CJ1120 was talking about.

Correct. Whatever the next-gen Amadeus/Star Alliance Global Platform is called.

My point is, if that's the path, it might make sense for them to use SHARES first due to a quicker deployment time in transition to Amadeus.

Giving $misek the benefit of the doubt (and I can't believe I'm doing this), perhaps this is an interim measure until they come up with something new. After all why pay Apollo licensing fees for a couple years if they're really working on a redesign as they say?

Also, the rumor I heard is that many of UA's UI systems will survive, but they'll be ported to SHARES as the back end. If that's the case, that's really all we care about. If the agents' lives are easier, our lives are easier dealing with them. After all they already have enough on their plate with upsells and shenanigans to worry about. ;)

Yes and Yes.

Apollo is extremely expensive and the rumor is that the "new" airport system will appear more like the current UA's system but SHARES will be the back end.

This is what I heard from the SVP of Airports whom I am close friends with, if so this will be excellent for IRROPS handling at the Airports. ^

That's very nice of you ¢hanna

I thot CO's website is generally considered to be better than .bomb, but I'm seeing opposite reactions?

I think each website has it's strong points, and while the CO website does shine in some areas, it can be rather overrated (just as I think UA's site is somewhat underrated.)

Anyways as long as they can maintain the functionality of what UA can currently do today (read: UA's GUI), I guess the specific back end host is somewhat irrelevant, but still it'll be an interesting time come Customer Day One.

W/r/t *A, IIRC the master plan is to eventually transition to a shared IT platform based on Amadeus 2.0 but who knows when that's going to reach technical viability, much less be ready for rollout across the *A partners. Also of note is that Amadeus was based off SHARES 'back in the day and of course SHARES became the successor to EA's SystemOne when a near-dead CO sold it off to EDS (now HP) in the early 90's to raise cash.

CO's website has some nice features, but so does UA's (the ability to view inventory buckets is a great feature). This is more about the backend systems.

UA's airport and reservations infrastructure is, I think, superior to CO's - I've been rebooked and rerouted in the space of 30 seconds on UA which it sounds like is far more laborious on CO. In addition, waitlisting for upgrades seems marginally better on UA (I don't quite understand why on a YBM-up on CO, the passenger has to keep checking for available space once it's booked). Finally, UA seems to be able to handle upsells at any point in the check-in process (OLCI, EasyCheckin, checkin agent, RCC agent, gate agent, customer service agent) that CO does not yet have?

UA wins on the ability to view inventory buckets with details.

CO wins on the ability to change and reissue a ticket online (yes, UA can sort-of do that, but only if you're not changing the origin and/or destination), award searches, level of detail provided on flight status (upgrade and flight standby lists available online, where is this plane coming from on flight status, details of in-flight amenities), and ability to mix up classes of service by flight segment as opposed to assigning a single class of service for the entire itinerary.

Another prediction of mine coming true. :cool: So far, the only prediction I've gotten wrong is the free booze at PCs going bye-bye. And that one I'm so glad I got wrong! :p

RNE, saying. "Now keep your fingers crossed that I am right about E+ staying."

I don't understand how you feel CO upsells more than UA as UA upsells first, E+, and premier lines at security. While these may not be options that you get as a 1K it is something I see day in and day out work at the UA counter.

The system is only as good as the rules for rebooking. If I can only book you on one airline then no matter the system it will take longer.

I have heard shares is to survive too. I would assume that a lot of the CO mobile site features are tied to the shares system so it would be easier to use that system.


As someone that is just learning Fastair I have to say that it is extremely confusing to use. For every operation online there are 3 to 6 ways to do the operation. This makes it hard to learn to properly navigate through and learn the system. It seems like everytime I ask someone for help in doing a task at work I learn another way to do so basically I have learned nothing as everyone tells me differnet ways to do things. UGH!! :mad: :mad:

No, a good company ultimately serves its customers first.

There has recently been a lot of research conducted and published (see Harvard Business Review and other journals) that have tracked companies over a long time.

The difference with UA's First Class upsell is that UA clear elites waitlisted for upgrades first prior to upsell. Upsell is only offered when there NF/NC>0.

Yes, this is what will happen. I know first hand YX licensed the same exact fastair interface (the GUI overlay) for use in its airport ops, and YX was on SABRE before it's demise.

I have only used fastair a handful of times; most of my airport time was spent on native apollo (GG commands, woot!). Fastair does make the agent's job much quicker and less training time. SHARES is a beast, only used it a few times when F9 was hosted and I can vividly recall it was not loved by agents.

It's confirmed: http://biz.yahoo.com/e/101222/13863558-k.html

The real question is, what's going to happen to E+ seats. ;)

R.I.P. Apollo :-/.

I don't know a lot about how SABRE works, but I have experienced US agents swearing at its existence more times than once. Not surprised at this at all though. Suspect we'll be feeling the pain at the next time I encounter IRROPS with UA once the IT integration finishes.

If we could only get answers on the continued survival on E+ (very important), and international F (semi-important)

SHARES has no place at a successful major global airline - the only major airlines that use it (Air Canada, Us Airways, Continental, and Virgin Atlantic) got stuck with it during periods of severe company financial distress. SHARES is particularly "hostile" in the area of interline bookings, which will make for alot of fun in its own right.

That said, I see it as temporary until the merged airline switches to the Star Alliance CITP based on Amadeus Altea, probably sometime mid-decade once the merger is fully completed so the cutover can be made on a "single carrier" basis.

Compltely agree. I use to work at Sabre selling againt both SHARES and Altea. You think Appllo is bad, SHARES is even worse. This is a stop gap solution until they move to a new generation solution.

However i will also say it is not a done deal the choice will be Altea either. Those talks are now open and HP/Sabre/Amadeus are all making new pitches. Whoever they choose in the end, about 2015 is about right for best case for a new res system cut over.

However there will be major pain for the old UA folks when they do take the step to SHARES. It will be a tough transition.

Shares is downright awful for agents wanting to do service recovery, re bookings, etc.This also means that (and I'm guessing all the UA codes are going away).

UA fliers (and certainly the high revenue pax) are used to the flexibility that Apollo allows. As an ex-1K i can tell you, I find it preposterous that

- it took a CO agent (at the PC) 20 minutes to rebook my ticket. The same transaction would have been done in less than 5 on UA.

- it took a CO agent (also at the PC) to ticket a reservation I made already, roughly 15 minutes to process a credit card payment

Am I right in thinking that the back end of a reservations system doesn't matter all that much, so long as the GUI is intuitive?

It really depends on what for and what you are used to. Obviously, I find using .bomb easier at this point, but CO's is generally thought of as better.

That is the big difference. Much better.

I kinda already see how this will play out when they to cut over to SHARES. If AA is smart during that period they will be there to grab passengers.

If AA is smart, they will eliminate the DoT's ability to track on time flights, cncls, IDBs, and lost bags.

http://airconsumer.dot.gov/reports/2...cemberATCR.PDF

(most recent data published).

A carrier should concentrate on where they are lagging the other competitors to acquire new customers vs trying to capitalize on a possible future issue that another carrier may have trying to integrate. One should compete on the product you can deliver, not on fear mongering on a competitor.

Most of the premium brands of the world never advertise anything about their competitors, rather, they elevate their own game to a high level, then advertise it. Like WN, back before they decided to compete in big money airports, had a great on time %. They advertised it, hyped it, even had jokes "Why doesn't WN have little bitty planes daddy? Well son, they always pull out on time." about it.

My opinion is that if AA wants to try to grab other airline passengers, they should 1st get their own game in order, then try to win customers based on superior performance.

But then again, that's just how I would try to make a premium brand name for myself, by offering a long term premium/quality/reliable service/product vs try to make short term gain on a temporary possible shortcoming of a competitor.

What I don't get is: When they were doing their cost analysis, did they consider GA and call center labor? Especially during irrops, effectively every ticket sold becomes unprofitable because of the amount of time required to rebook each ticket. 20 minutes of agent time is not cheap, and they must know this, not to mention customer ill-will when it takes hours upon hours to rebook an entire plane.

There must be one hell of a cost difference between the two systems overall for them to put up with the difference in labor costs to operate.