Confirm Project

Last updated

CONFIRM was an ambitious IT project supposed to create a single computer reservations system/global distribution system used by airline, rental car, and hotel companies. It is often used as a case study as an example of a major failure in project management.

Contents

History

The system was pursued to develop in order to create synergies between AMR, Marriott, Hilton Hotels Corporation and Budget Rent-A-Car and fully integrate and unify the reservation systems of the companies involved.

In 1988 the four large corporations made contracts to complete the system by June 1992 project at a cost of $55 million. Unfortunately, the project turned out to be much more complex to finish than the partners had anticipated. They all had high hopes based that AMR would expand on the extremely successful SABRE computer reservation system that had helped American Airlines create a sustainable competitive advantage after the deregulation of the airline industry. In April 1992, just three months before the system was intended to go live, Confirm failed tests at Los Angeles-based Hilton. AMR also told its partners that it needed another 15 to 18 months to complete the system. The project was never completed. In the process more than 500 technical personnel worked on the project; when the partners disbanded the project in July 1992 they had spent three and a half years and $125 million on the project.

The technical complexity of this project was extreme. CONFIRM runs on two IBM 3090 mainframes. One houses the central reservations system, which runs under Transaction Processing Facility. The other mainframe houses a DB2 relational database in an MVS [1] (an IBM mainframe operating system) environment. The database contains decision-support information such as customer histories and pricing data. The system required application-to-application bridging between the two mainframes (CPUs/IBM 3090) for some 60 applications. The main problem was to tie CONFIRM's transaction-processing facility-based central reservation system with its decision support system. Hilton users found that the system's user interface, mainframe transaction processing and mainframe database did not adequately communicate with one another. Other problems included different programming languages and difficulties with recovering databases in event of crashes. These problems were not insurmountable, but they would delay the project for about two extra years.

In September 1992 AMR (American Airlines) sued Marriott, Hilton and Budget, alleging they caused CONFIRM's failure by withholding funds, making poor staffing assignment and withdrawing prematurely. The three partners countersued.

In January 1994 American Airlines reached out-of court settlements with all of its partners for undisclosed amounts. [2] [3]

See also

Further reading

Related Research Articles

IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the computer market with the 7000 series and the later System/360, followed by the System/370. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of the System/360.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">MVS</span> Operating system for IBM mainframes

Multiple Virtual Storage, more commonly called MVS, is the most commonly used operating system on the System/370, System/390 and IBM Z IBM mainframe computers. IBM developed MVS, along with OS/VS1 and SVS, as a successor to OS/360. It is unrelated to IBM's other mainframe operating system lines, e.g., VSE, VM, TPF.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mainframe computer</span> Large computer

A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing. A mainframe computer is large but not as large as a supercomputer and has more processing power than some other classes of computers, such as minicomputers, servers, workstations, and personal computers. Most large-scale computer-system architectures were established in the 1960s, but they continue to evolve. Mainframe computers are often used as servers.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Transaction Processing Facility</span> IBM real-time operating system

Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) is an IBM real-time operating system for mainframe computers descended from the IBM System/360 family, including zSeries and System z9.

z/OS 64-bit operating system for IBM mainframes

z/OS is a 64-bit operating system for IBM z/Architecture mainframes, introduced by IBM in October 2000. It derives from and is the successor to OS/390, which in turn was preceded by a string of MVS versions. Like OS/390, z/OS combines a number of formerly separate, related products, some of which are still optional. z/OS has the attributes of modern operating systems, but also retains much of the older functionality originated in the 1960s and still in regular use—z/OS is designed for backward compatibility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Db2</span> Relational model database server

Db2 is a family of data management products, including database servers, developed by IBM. It initially supported the relational model, but was extended to support object–relational features and non-relational structures like JSON and XML. The brand name was originally styled as DB/2, then DB2 until 2017 and finally changed to its present form.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">CICS</span> IBM mainframe transaction monitor

IBM CICS is a family of mixed-language application servers that provide online transaction management and connectivity for applications on IBM mainframe systems under z/OS and z/VSE.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM Airline Control Program</span> Operating system developed by IBM beginning about 1965

IBM Airline Control Program, or ACP, is a discontinued operating system developed by IBM beginning about 1965. In contrast to previous airline transaction processing systems, the most notable aspect of ACP is that it was designed to run on most models of the IBM System/360 mainframe computer family. This departed from the earlier model in which each airline had a different, machine-specific transaction system.

Sabre Global Distribution System, owned by Sabre Corporation, is a travel reservation system used by travel agents and companies to search, price, book, and ticket travel services provided by airlines, hotels, car rental companies, rail providers and tour operators. Originally developed by American Airlines under CEO C.R. Smith with the assistance of IBM in 1960, the booking service became available for use by external travel agents in 1976 and became independent of the airline in March 2000.

RETAIN is a mainframe based database system, accessed via IBM 3270 terminals, used internally within IBM providing service support to IBM field personnel and customers.

z/Architecture, initially and briefly called ESA Modal Extensions (ESAME), is IBM's 64-bit complex instruction set computer (CISC) instruction set architecture, implemented by its mainframe computers. IBM introduced its first z/Architecture-based system, the z900, in late 2000. Later z/Architecture systems include the IBM z800, z990, z890, System z9, System z10, zEnterprise 196, zEnterprise 114, zEC12, zBC12, z13, z14, z15 and z16.

In computing, a Parallel Sysplex is a cluster of IBM mainframes acting together as a single system image with z/OS. Used for disaster recovery, Parallel Sysplex combines data sharing and parallel computing to allow a cluster of up to 32 systems to share a workload for high performance and high availability.

ALCS, which stands for Airline Control System, is an application server that provides industrial-strength, online transaction management for mission-critical applications.

A transaction processing system (TPS) is a software system, or software/hardware combination, that supports transaction processing.

QIK is an intelligent airline agent application first developed in the late 1980s as a front end to mainframe computer reservations systems.

The history of IBM mainframe operating systems is significant within the history of mainframe operating systems, because of IBM's long-standing position as the world's largest hardware supplier of mainframe computers. IBM mainframes run operating systems supplied by IBM and by third parties.

A teleprocessing monitor is a control program that monitors the transfer of data between multiple local and remote terminals to ensure that the transaction processes completely or, if an error occurs, to take appropriate actions.

The Input/Output Configuration Program is a program on IBM mainframes.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM 9370</span> IBM mainframe-compatible low-end system

The IBM 9370 systems are "baby mainframe" midrange computers, released 1986 at the very low end of, and compatible with System/370. The media of the day, referring to the VAX systems manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), carried IBM's alleged "VAX Killer" phrase, albeit often skeptically.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IBM System/390</span> Line of mainframe computers

The IBM System/390 is a discontinued mainframe product family implementing ESA/390, the fifth generation of the System/360 instruction set architecture. The first computers to use the ESA/390 were the Enterprise System/9000 (ES/9000) family, which were introduced in 1990. These were followed by the 9672, Multiprise, and Integrated Server families of System/390 in 1994–1999, using CMOS microprocessors. The ESA/390 succeeded ESA/370, used in the Enhanced 3090 and 4381 "E" models, and the System/370 architecture last used in the IBM 9370 low-end mainframe. ESA/390 was succeeded by the 64-bit z/Architecture in 2000.

References

  1. ↑ MVS
  2. ↑ "Examples of IT Project failure". Archived from the original on 2010-03-30. Retrieved 2010-06-12.
  3. ↑ "THE STANDISH GROUP REPORT" (PDF). The Standish Group. 1995. Retrieved 12 June 2010.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.