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Computer Weekly

The IT departments at British Airways and Iberia have some hard work ahead of them after the two airlines announced they are to merge.

The lack of standardisation between most airline IT systems is likely to make the job a tough one. BA has been in merger talks with both Quantas and Iberia airlines for months and although it is too early to say how integrated the two companies’ systems will become, it is likely some of them will need to be interoperable.

Robert Morgan, a consultant at Hamilton Bailey, said there are very few common systems in the airline industry.

“It will be a huge task for any airlines to merge systems. This is because many have developed them in their own way,” he said.

The interesting thing with this the duality of the situation. The business sponsors will be asking for inventory information,  data centers, applications, servers, networks and storage. It’s important to know what it is you have, in terms of assets and services, but what is equally important is to decide on which applications and services will be kept, which will be merged or replaced by our partners systems, only then can we look at systems integrations, consolidation of data center and infrastructure. With the applications andd services established we can then see what systems are in scope to be kept, what are being decommissioned, see what infrastructure is needed, where it is located and therefore what savings can be realized. At the same time we need to operate two projects simultaneoulsy:

Support/BAU (Business As Usual), we need to optimize and keep what we have working as best as possible, continue upgrading what we have to maintain service and ‘production’, we have to maintain investment for those projects which have to go ahead regardless of the platform/business integration.

Integration project – start the switchover of services, of applications, switching services over from one platform to another, for example integrating users on to the BA passenger booking system without resulting in users being disconnected or locked out of the system.

In business integration projects, the list of applications and services being made ‘organizational’ standards are key, with this list, IT can then illustrate the possible savings, the impact to different business lines when we start integrating applications and services, the operational risk if you will. We often start asking questions about numbers of servers, of operating systems, layered applications and databases used, this is important, but they’re those kind of questions that are useful for benchmarking, but not of value until we establish the application consolidation, until we know what applications and services we’re keeping, once that’s established we can:

• Establish the servers and applications that will be decommissioned

• Establish the savings from: reduced power, space and hardware support costs – fewer servers, less cost

• Establish what we can do in terms of consolidation, virtualization and decommissioning of hardware, infrastructure and data centers.

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