Why did United move to CO SHARES?
 

Does anyone know what the business reason was to move all United IT backend to the CO system given its antiquity which has resulted in... problems?

It costs less to operate year over year.

And, FWIW, the other option was about the same in terms of antiquity.

PMUA was on Apollo but was, at the time of the merger, implementing the Amedeus Altea (aka the *A technology) platform.

http://www.travelpulse.com/united-wi...al-merger.html

I will agree it was 1000000% about cost....

It was not feasible to run parallel systems for another full year before there was a chance of the Altea system being ready to go. They can still move in that direction at some point in the future, but they had to do something much sooner than 2013 to get on a single platform in order to be able to effectively run the company.

It wasn't just about cost.

You have to pick a single system. One is owned and supported by reputable software company that plans to continue supporting it as a stand alone system. The other is owned by a transaction processing company that works with many airlines and would like to consolidate its 3 legacy reservation systems as much as possible.

So you pick a system that only smaller faction of your customer base, and smaller faction of your employees are familiar with?

SHARES may be OK to handle the size of PMCO. The chaos in the first 10 days since 3/3 show that SHARES is not capable of dealing complexity of operation of a true global airline.

It will shake out, flights are still going out and issues as they are coming up are being addressed.

The system merger will take about a year from the go date (3/3) as all of the PMUA apollo stuff filters out of the system.

I'm sure penetration was a consideration. However, based on my experience with Travelport, UAL probably many compelling tangible and intangible reasons to go with SHARES.

I feel like this single comment sums up many, many FTers views on the merger :cool:

Chaos? No. Typical merger stuff with relatively few problems compared to other mergers of this size.

Some people will complain about any change.

Oh good, here we go again. A hundred FT members whose qualifications are "working in IT for 20 years" and "flying on planes for 20 years" are going to tell us exactly what happened and why it was stupid, because they are privy to what the internal decision process was. Well, I don't need 20 years of IT experience, because I have read FT and can tell you exactly what happened.

According to the logic of this board,Jeff Smisek himself made the decision, and he did it to screw over 1Ks to ensure they wouldn't get their upgrades. That is the business reason. It's all the business reason they need - Jeff is the megalomaniac evil dictator of UAL, makes all decisions, and whatever he says goes.

I am also quite sure, from reading this board, that had they stuck with Apollo, there would have been no integration problems. Because there's only a single IT system at play here, and it's SHARES. SHARES is responsible for the absolute disaster situation we find ourselves in now, where miles earned LAST WEEK have not posted in my account yet! What a botched integration. I can't believe that I'm still waiting for miles from LAST WEEK to post. I realize that March 3 came and went without a bunch of flights being cancelled, but can you imagine that they prioritized running the airline and getting planes in the air over making sure miles posted within hours of earning? This is all Jeff Smisek's fault. Because Jeff hates 1Ks.

So there you go.

The status quo for SHARES was probably workable for a small airline like PMCO. With the merged airline, it's simply an outdated system

Even if UA had stuck with Apollo, there would have been integration headaches. Merging data from one system to another is never without issue. Moreover, instead of having pmUA employees learning a new system, you'd have pmCO employees learning a new system.

I just wish they would have come up with a web site that combined the best of the pmCO and pmUA websites.

Fact. It is all about the money.I know how much and it's alot. Enough to make customers frustrated right now,but shareholders happy.Saying things are messed up right now is an understatement. There will be upgrades to SHARES in the near future so help is on the way.

I feel like it was an appropriate choice of words to describe air travel in general these days.

Ignoring aesthetics for the moment, what functionality do you think is missing?