|
Sabre schedules airline reservations. It's not compliant.
Sabre also sells
y2k-repair services to other large corporations. Yet Sabre is not compliant.
This is from COMPUTERWORLD (March 2).
* * * * * * * *
The Sabre Group is racing to fix year 2000 problems in all its internal systems by June -- six months ahead of most companies -- so there will be time later to coordinate testing with its more than 1,500 external data feeds. . . .
"It was important to make sure our house was clean," said Deborah Freedman, 42, a senior vice president and year 2000 project czar at Sabre. The company wanted to finish its in-house work before it scheduled integration testing with computer reservations systems such as Galileo, Amadeus and other external data feeds.
Year 2000 compliance among Sabre's electronic data interchange (EDI) partners is a constantly moving target, because it is unlikely that all its partners will have adopted new EDI standards that were released in December. As such, Sabre must be ready to process in the old and new formats and conduct continuous integration testing "to make sure that we stay year 2000-compliant," Freedman said. . . .
To become millennium-ready by June, Sabre must pore through 200 million lines of mainframe code. It must also help coordinate work among American Airlines, Seattle-based The Boeing Co. and other manufacturers to identify hundreds of date-sensitive embedded systems located in the cockpits of 840 American and American Eagle aircraft. And it must replace or repair the hardware and software that supports 180,000 terminals that connect to its reservations system, among other tasks.
Sabre's massive coordination requirements help explain why the group last summer had to double its original year 2000 project cost estimates -- from $30 million to $40 million for 1997-98 to roughly $78 million. Including Sabre, AMR expects to spend about $200 million to fix its year 2000 problem. . . .
And Freedman has to make sure that the maintenance equipment in airports that American Airlines flies in and out of is ready to roll. "It won't do us a lot of good if we're [year 2000] compliant and they're not," said Freedman, referring to airports in the U.S., Japan, South America and Europe.
|