Worldspan Inks Five-Year Deal With IBMWorldspan Inks Five-Year Deal With IBM

Airline ticketing processor Worldspan LP is upgrading its reservations system with $350 million worth of software, hardware, and consulting services from IBM Global Services' travel and transportation group.

Worldspan purchased several new servers from IBM and is integrating IBM's WebSphere software with its airline-ticketing transaction-processing server. The contract provides for five years of server capacity and development of Worldspan's newly designed and rewritten TCP/IP infrastructure and network. IBM will also provide consulting services and its offshore outsourcing resources for Java coding, says David Lauderdale, senior VP of Worldspan's technical operations. Worldspan is also buying Tivoli systems-management software to manage its computer systems and software applications more efficiently from the data center.

Worldspan, which is owned by AMR, Delta Air Lines, and Northwest Airlines, processes about 6,000 transactions per second using IBM's Transaction Processing Facility. TPF is an updated version of a 40-year-old mainframe-based operating system that's used primarily in the travel and financial-services industries because it can handle large transaction volumes at high speed, says Bill Diffenderffer, an IBM Global Services VP.

In addition to providing business-travel services through its TripManager service, Worldspan also processes airline tickets for Internet sites Expedia, Orbitz, and Priceline.com.