Technology portal to attract airlines

Lufthansa Systems, the IT services arm of the German airline, is to spend €40m (£27m) on a one-stop-shop technology portal for airlines.

The company is developing the system to try to win back airlines within the Star Alliance that have signed deals for a common IT infrastructure with vendor Amadeus, including United Airlines and even Lufthansa (Computing, 14 September).

Lufthansa Systems says the portal – dubbed Face (Future Airline Core Environment) – will be ready next year, and it has already signed up UK airline BMI and Qatar Airways to use the system.

‘The common IT platform is not so brilliant because Lufthansa decided to have their systems hosted by Amadeus from 2007,’ Ulf Windhorst, manager for network management products in the Infratec arm of Lufthansa Systems told Computing.

‘We failed to win the deal and that is one of the black moments in time.’

By the end of 2007, Lufthansa plans to have migrated its inventory and departure control systems to Amadeus’ common IT platform. It already uses the vendor’s reservation system.

Lufthansa Systems will invest €40m in Face, which has to be allocated by its parent company. Windhorst hopes this investment will help entice Lufthansa to Face.

‘Face is a big project and if Lufthansa is going to give €40m to build a new system, I hope it will come back to us when it is ready,’ said Windhorst.

‘We are building a new platform for all the services you need within an airline business. These services will be on Unix platforms and be very scalable.

‘The new platform will be ready next year. These customers – BMI and Qatar – have signed with us because they don’t want to go to Amadeus,’ he said.

Windhorst says the Amadeus infrastructure works fine, but it is old, and he claims the Lufthansa portal will be more futureproof.

At the core of the infrastructure will be a highly scalable network environment based largely on the Sniffer monitoring and performance technology from vendor Network General.

Lufthansa Systems has been working with Network General for 10 years and in 2002, delivered the Star Net network infrastructure project.

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