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The SABRE system, which handles airline reservations, is not 2000-compliant. A January 30 press release announces the adoption of a new y2k remediation tool, GILES. This indicates that the repair is still incomplete, and not just incomplete: in its early phase. The press release says, "GILES is being used in the early and most critical phase of year2000 resolution, identifying software that needs to be fixed."
The
California White Paper says that awareness is the first 1% of any y2k repair; inventory is the next 1%; assessment is 5%. SABRE is not yet to the actual recoding phase.
SABRE also leases computer time to firms that want y2k testing in 1999.
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Many companies have reservations about their computers' ability to traverse the turn of the century without failing. But The SABRE Group (NYSE:TSG) has already begun its year2000 remediation process using GILES 2001 to identify areas that could be impacted by the infamous computer anomaly.
After evaluating several approaches to identifying potential problems associated with two-digit year fields, which are expected to present serious challenges when the year changes from 1999 to 2000, The SABRE Group has added Giles 2001 to its tool portfolio to be used throughout its travel reservations business.
A product of Global Software, Inc., of Duxbury, Massachusetts, GILES is being used in the early and most critical phase of year2000 resolution, identifying software that needs to be fixed. . . .
"We selected GILES 2001 because we expect it to provide a solid contribution to The SABRE Group's year2000 conversion effort," said Greg Webb, the director of The SABRE Group's y2k project. "The travel industry has a year less than many businesses to resolve its year2000 problem. Airplane tickets are usable for a year, meaning that the travel industry has less than a year to update and test their entire systems for year2000 compliance. Any ticket written after Dec. 31, 1998 will expire after the turn of the century. We're working to ensure our airline and agency customers are prepared -- especially since the industry has no choice but to be ready." . . .
Many organizations with multiple languages are likely to run into trouble even if they tackle their primary languages with automated tools, explained Graham Thompson, Global's director of sales and marketing. If they do not fully identify date fields within the source code of their non-mainstream languages, these dates could be passed through program calls or through files/databases into their primary languages and not be recognized as dates.
So year2000 non-conformance will not necessarily be limited to the applications developed with these non-mainstream languages, he continued.
"The industry seems to have lost sight of the fact that only about half of source code is written in Cobol. If we believe the figure bandied around today, 90 billion lines of code throughout the world, the industry has been turning its back on over 40 billion lines of code," said Thompson.
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