What are the main activities presently being handled by the IT division of United Airlines?
At present, the IT division of United Airlines has about 2,000 people based in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles and San Francisco. We build systems that cover a whole range of applications such as reservations and sales. We have a very large presence on the internet under our website called ual.com. We are accelerating these efforts and hope to do a lot more in that area. The maintenance and engineering department takes care of the aircraft and systems. How we push technology here is by providing the technicians with an online system that allows them to keep track of the aircraft. We operate two large data centers, one of which is in Denver where reservations are processed. The other one is in Chicago where we have a significant underground facility that does our flight planning. There is an operations’ research group that does mathematical modeling of our various problems.

Could you tell us what packages you use for data processing?
Our LAN uses Novell servers and Bay Network routers. We have a very large TCP/IP network deployed worldwide and the company is using Oracle as well as Informix data structures heavily. Our web-based technology is run in a Unix environment. For reservations, we have created an in-house product called Apollo.

...But why didn’t you go for any of the popular CRS brands for reservations?
Actually, Apollo is one such solution for reservations. It is the underlying system for Galileo, which is one of the largest global CRS. So, we created the original system that is now providing reservation services to the travel world.

What are the other technology areas you plan to invest in future?
We look at airlines as a series of applications portfolios. We’ll make investments in our revenue portfolio, which covers internet sales. One of the other areas is asset maintenance. We’ll be making considerable investment in that area because there is a large amount of inventory, aircraft parts and so on that can be reduced by utilization of new technology and by better services. Additionally, there is the area of flight training where we can do a lot with technology and support the crews with the latest information. We’ll improve our flight operations through better training and scheduling for our pilots and crews. From a sum of $500 million, we spend about $200 million in applications development. Internet-based applications are another important area where we plan to expand in the future.

How crucial do you think IT has become for the airline industry today?
IT is the nervous system of an airline. If it doesn’t work well, your limbs and arms don’t work well either. That is the basic fact, but now I think IT has also become the innovation point. It can help you to alter your products. With some of the internet offerings, the kind of sales and service benefits that you can offer to your travelers couldn’t have been done earlier. So, now it is not just the nervous system, but it also offers innovations for business. IT has certainly become very vital and the larger the airline, the more critical it is.

In your long experience with the airline industry, what kind of transformation you have noticed in technology?
I’ve had the opportunity to work with two airlines— American Airlines and United Airlines. Both of them use technology as nervous system, or innovation point. The technology itself has changed greatly from basics like ‘you must invent the technology’ to creation of specific protocols for the airline industry. And today you have newer techniques that allow much more innovation and can be leveraged for even better services for the traveler. It is like a part of the soup that adds to its taste. That’s been the biggest differentiating change over in the last few years. And internet is obviously the key to the changes.