SABRE Breaks the Record Again

The SABRE Group, a subsidiary of AMR Corporation of which American Airlines is also a member, provides the airline industry's most widely used ticketing and reservation systems - using a global network of more than 250 thousand terminals in 71 countries connected to its formidable complex of IBM S/390 mainframes at its Tulsa, Oklahoma computer center. A recognized leader in providing transaction and network processing services to its clients, the Sabre global distribution system manages more than 25% of the world's airline reservations. Each day the system tracks more than 80 million passengers and is responsible for one billion transaction weekly. As an innovative user of application and computing technology, SABRE is in the forefront of high volume mission critical transaction processing.

At the heart of its operations is the mission critical high volume transaction processing system - Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) - providing information to individual customers, reservation agents, airlines and hotels round the clock worldwide.

Crucial Test: The recent threatened strike at AA, SABRE's largest customer, put its mission critical systems to a crucial test. Just as the prospect of the strike prompted travelers to change reservations in great numbers, millions rushed to take advantage of the cheap fares AA offered to make amends.

This switch created an enormous computing load on the network of systems that process the fares, pricing and reservation applications as customers tried to find the best fares between any two points for travel. It was critical that the entire reservation system be available and reliable 1000/o ofthe time to take advantage of this business opportunity while providing smooth response to the millions of customers looking for the best buys.

Dale Buchanan, Managing Director of Real-time Operations at SABRE commented that " as the processing load increased dramatically, the TPF system reached a new threshold for speed and response, delivering a stellar transaction processing performance in excess of 5,200 transactions per second - exceeding the prior high of 4,900 transactions per second reached earlier in the year':

The TPF system is designed and optimized for mission critical applications like that of the SABRE Group, requiring very high transaction volumes supported by large, complex networks. The SABRE Group and IBM have combined their expertise and resources to Provide easy access and the rapid response to the SABRE reservation system - a system that "handles 52 million airfares - updated five times per day - for more than 300 million bookings per year; each transaction taking less than two seconds" as reported in the Computerworld of March 19 1997.