HP finally took the wraps off the branding of the airline reservations system it is developing, calling it the HP Agilaire Passenger Service Solution.
The news about the branding of the system, which would be a successor to the HP SHARES res system used by Continental and other carriers, came out paradoxically as HP Enterprise Services, formerly known as EDS, agreed to license software from Pegasus Solutions, the hotel technology and distribution services company.
HP Enterprise Services announced it licensed the Pegasus Solutions RezView NG distribution platform, which HP says will accelerate its development of a consumer travel enterprise platform for airlines and "tier one" hotels.
That consumer travel enterprise platform, hosted by HP, will be known as Agilaire in the airline sector while the name of its incarnation in the hotel arena has yet to be determined.
Over the years, Pegasus has deployed RezView NG on an SaaS basis to 10,000 hotels, says Pegasus CEO Mike Kistner. RezView enables hotels to manage inventory, whether it be room or nonroom inventory, as well as availability, pricing and properties.
So, what does that have to do with HP's airline business?
Kistner says Pegasus acquired RezView from GuestClick in 2007 and he has always maintained that RezView is not merely a CRS for hotels, but is an enterprise delivery platform, based on Oracle database technology, which can sell a multitude of items, from rail tickets to bottles of champagne, and interface with wildly disparate systems.
Most hotels and airlines currently still use antiquated systems that weren't designed to handle all the "looks" from metasearch engines or rich media, for example, Kistner says.
RezView, he says, provides a strong foundation for "where do we go next" in airline systems and hospitality platforms.
Until now, HP didn't have intellectual property of its own for the hospitality industry and RezView closes that software gap, says Shelley Perry, vice president of industry software and solutions at HP.
Perry adds that RezView will be a building block for HP's travel solutions and will accelerate the company's initiatives and rollouts in both the airline and hospitality sectors, with airlines as the initial focus.
HP intends to integrate RezView into the company's consumer travel solutions using HP Transportation SOA. This would enable faster implementation of HP's solutions in both the airline and hospitality sectors, HP says.
HP has one customer, American Airlines, for its new passenger services system. American brands the product, which is under development, Jetstream, while HP will market the solution to other airlines as Agilaire.
Agilaire salespeople undoubtedly have made a few calls to management at United Continental Holdings. Although the process could take years, observers assume that the merged airlines one day will be on a single reservations system.
United currently uses Travelport's Apollo and Continental is on HP's SHARES. Agilaire is meant to be an eventual successor to SHARES.
HP likely hopes that its licensing of RezView won't hurt in its efforts to woo United, Continental and other potential airline customers.
HP's consumer travel solutions product for the hospitality industry will share some Agilaire components, but the hotel product has yet to be branded.
HP is tight-lipped about the progress of Agilaire/Jetstream.
However, in today's announcement, HP does say that Agilaire will have ancillary services capabilities compliant with industry standards using HP Electronic Miscellaneous Documents, and also will contain an HP Ticket Reissue and Refund module.
HP's decision to license Pegasus RezView grows out of the two companies' 7-year outsourcing deal, which kicked off in 2009. Under that agreement, HP Enterprise Services manages Pegasus' applications, data center services and network.
When the outsourcing deal was announced a year ago, the two companies said one important aspect of the deal was that RezView would be integrated into HP's SOA platform.
At the time, Valyn Perini, executive director of the Open Travel Alliance, said putting RezView on the SOA platform could extend the platform's life, but might be an arduous process.
HP and Pegasus appear to be edging closer to meeting that integration goal.
Although the airline industry is the first target of the company's efforts, HP also intends to leverage RezView to develop CRS and property management solutions replete with Web functionality for the hospitality industry using modular components.
Kistner says it will be a hospitality industry first to have a large platform such as HP's, with all of its multifunctional components, integrated into an SOA environment.
Kistner adds that HP's licensing of the software from Pegasus "is a stamp of credibility for the industry."