IBM Deutschland GmbH will no doubt be taking a slightly nervous interest in the management difficulties experienced within the Amadeus airline reservation system consortium. After being beaten by Memorex Telex International NV to a bumper contract to supply the rival Galileo consortium of British Airways with personal computers, IBM found consolation in a $400m deal with Amadeus (CI No 1,421), the venture formed by Air France, Iberia, Lufthansa and Scandinavian Airlines System. But 01 Informatique reckons that after a promising start there are signs of a mini-crisis at Amadeus. First, the Swedish president Gurt Ekstrom has decided that three years at Amadeus is enough, and has gone back to Stockholm to head the Unisys Corp operation there. But perhaps more disturbingly, a strong internal rivalry has developed between the Swedish airline company SAS Ekstrom’s former company before Amadeus – and Germany’s Lufthansa over control of the North European side of the operation; this in-house wrangling has culminated in the resignation of the German marketing director Hans Dieter Farber. If that wasn’t enough, it now looks certain that Amadeus is not going to make its planned introduction date of March next year, despite the fact that the main development centre at Sophia-Antipolis is doubling its capacity by adding a further 350 employees.
