IBM UK has now issued full details of the equipment it will be supplying to the Amadeus reservations consortium formed by Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa and Scandinavian Airlines System. The deal for the global Travel Information and Distribution System is worth more than $100m to IBM, and the Amadeus airlines, which handle about 60% of the scheduled European air traffic, will be spending $300m forming a company that will have 600 employees in the first year of operation. As prime contractor ans systems integrator, IBM will be responsible for hardware and operating software for the international communications system which will link the associated airlines, travel agencies and other users. The application software will be Texas Air’s System One. Following the initial work of conversion of the System One application software and the adaptation of the IBM software to the Amadeus requirements, the final test and integration work will be carried out by IBM France and IBM Germany. IBM Spain will support the Amadeus headquarters and marketing groups in Madrid. Amadeus will rank as one of the world’s biggest systems and will use top-end 3090s with the central database on multiple 3380 disks. The control software will be Transaction Processing Facility. Connectivity between the Amadeus 3090s, the airlines’ individual national reservation systems and four existing travel agency networks, Esterel, Savia, Smart and Start, will be achieved by an X25 network and open systems protocols covering layers four to seven. IBM will be training Amadeus staff to meet the planned cut-over schedule to live operation.
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