Sabre has been marketing cubeless, a social networking platform and knowledge base, to corporations inside and outside the travel industry, but now, it turns out, chairman and CEO Sam Gilliland has abandoned the corner office for a cube.
OK, no real connection between cubeless and Gilliland's cube decision other than the fact that both symbolize a sort of opening up and a laudable democratization of sorts.
Tnooz Editor Kevin May, citing a Dallas Morning News interview of Gilliland, wrote today that Sabre is considering an IPO.
In the same Dallas Morning News interview, Gilliland discusses his new workplace digs and how the Southlake, Texas-based company has reduced costs by trimming its headquarters' space and allowing more employees to work from home.
"And I'm in a cube as well -- I'm in the corner over there," Gilliland says. "I'm in a cube as well and all of us that have been in offices moved into cubes and there are no offices here now. I think it's important that we're all eating from the same plate and it's made the whole process easier to take costs out of the operations."
In other words, if there are layoffs and cutbacks, the execs have to show that the lean times are impacting their perks, too.
Meanwhile, if the newspaper interview had taken place in Gilliland's cube, I wonder how his co-workers in neighboring cubes would have reacted to the following spin about Sabre's loss of its American Airlines' hosting contract to HP.
Gilliland says in the interview: "In that relationship [with American Airlines] I'm sure there are a number of things we could have done better. On the other hand if you look at the specific process we're pleased that HP/EDS came out on top of that. In my discussions with folks at American I was very supportive of that. Our view is that if you step back to 2001 much of the service that we were offering up to American we sold to what is now HP. We sold that because we thought the EDSs and IBMs of the world were better at managing desktops and information services. We wanted to focus on specific technologies for the airlines and that's what we've done."
It is believed that Sabre wasn't among the two finalists for the American Airlines reservations-system hosting contract.
And, the only other finalist besides HP/EDS was Amadeus and its Altea platform.
So, it is hardly surprising that Gilliland would have been "very supportive" of HP/EDS over Sabre's global rival, Amadeus.
In addition, in 2001 Sabre outsourced much of its IT to EDS, which was later acquired by HP, and Sabre and EDS extended the agreement through 2014.
So, by selecting HP and its nascent Jetstream passenger services system, American Airlines kind of keeps its reservations system within the broader Sabre family.
At least, that's what some people in and around Gilliland's new cube might have you believe.