Officials at global distribution systems -- Travelport, Sabre and Amadeus -- rave about their turbo-charged zTPF mainframes as they still at times labor to introduce products that consumers long have taken for granted. But, can GDSs still be "cool?"
And, does Travelport, in particular, have juice?
Mark Ryan, Travelport's chief information officer, argues that there has been a cultural transformation at the company over the last few years and that Travelport now wreaks of coolness.
Some 20% of the GDS staff was replaced through "attrition" over the last few years, and Ryan says he's hired people with expertise in things such as system architecture and Big Data.
"We are embracing change," says Ryan, who landed at Travelport in June 2009 after working for IBM, eBay, Vodafone, Weather.com and most recently Matria Healthcare in Atlanta. "The whole organization says it's great to be cool again."
OK, talking about GDSs being cool may elicit well-deserved groans from critics.
But, Ryan is not backing down from the boast.
"I don't want my technology guys to be bits and bytes guys," Ryan insists.
Instead, he wants the geeks at Travelport to focus on the user experience, just as some travel agents are doing, he says, by not just selling flights, "but enabling the journey."
And, yes, it can be debated whether Travelport has momentum or not, but it undeniably has "juice" -- in the form of the Travelport Juice Lab, a development and testing facility in Denver.
Ryan oversees development hubs in Denver; Atlanta; Kansas City; Langley, UK, as well as a joint venture technology enterprise in Delhi, India.
His marching orders are: "Fail fast, fail often and learn faster than the competition."
With all of that data at the company's disposal, Ryan says the GDS is in the process of enabling travel agents in different regions to tailor flight sales to the differentiated ways passengers in particular markets tend to feel about layovers.
And, a mobile app for ViewTrip, Travelport's largely static itinerary management service, is coming "soon," Ryan says.
Clearly, this is a GDS version of cool which Ryan has in mind -- bringing in new technologies and skills to modernize the services which travel agents receive and offer to their customers.
Consider ViewTrip, which currently isn't very mobile or social. Marketed by travel agencies to their clients, the functionality of Travelport ViewTrip seemingly is light years behind consumer-oriented itinerary management services from TripIt and WorldMate, for instance.
ViewTrip has a long way to go even get into the conversation.
And, then one of the things that the Juice Lab is working on is a way to deliver flight alerts through ViewTrip to travelers -- and that's a functionality that Travelport-controlled Orbitz has been offering to consumers for about a decade.
Ryan also is proud of Travelport's new Universal Desktop, which he feels has more juice and cool than, as other Travelport officials refer to it, "a re-skinned desktop," which is their not-so-veiled reference to the Sabre Red Workspace.
Ryan argues that the Univeral Desktop is cool because of things like its queue management features, its workflow, and purported capacity to take new travel agency employees and train them on the desktop within four days.
This helps travel agency managers cope with the costs of educating a new agent and softens the productivity hit when a veteran agent leaves, Ryan says.
Sabre and Amadeus, too, of course, might offer different perspectives on whether Travelport's tech is cool or not-so-cool.
But, Ryan says he doesn't care what Sabre or Amadeus thinks.
"I disallow my guys to look at the competition," Ryan says. "I want them to lead."
Those are indeed the marching orders.
Note: The author took part in a Travelport-sponsored press event in Atlanta.