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By Professor Jim Norton Freng,sponsored by Amadeus

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2 About the AuthorOpen for Business:

Professor Jim NortonFREng Beng Cdir CITP Ceng Deng LLD FloD FRSA is immediate Past President of the BCS – the Chartered Institute for IT, a board member of the parliamentary office of Science and Technology, Chief External Examiner for the Institute of Director’s Certificate in Company Direction and a trustee of the Foundation for information Policy Research.

His past roles include Chief Executive of the UK Radiocommunications Agency and Chairman of Deutsche Telekom Ltd. He is a respected adviser to governments, an independent director and has served on several notable enquires and commissions. He led the team that authored the report on e-commerce for the British Prime Minister and was a member of the IPPR’s Commission on National Security in the 21st Century.

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3 About AmadeusOpen for Business:

Amadeus IT Group is a leading transaction processor and provider of advanced technology solutions for the global travel and tourism industry.

First investor in R&D for the computer services and travel and tourism sectors (€340m in 2011)

Committed both to Open Source and to thought leadership.

Currently using Open Source in key projects like Altéa Reservations, Inventory, Departure Control System, among others.

We have sponsored this new white paper that urges the travel industry to embrace the benefits of open source software

(OSS).

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4 What is Open Source Software?Open for Business:

In computing, open systems refers to systems built using OSS standards. They offer a good level of portability and independence from the hardware

platforms on which they operate. The three characteristics of OSS are openness, availability, and no restrictions.

1.Open

The standard must not

withhold any detail necessary for the exchange

and use of information.

2.Available

The standard must be freely and publicly available under royalty free terms at

a reasonable cost.

3.Unrestricted

All patents essential to implementation of the standard must be licensed under royalty free terms for unrestricted use.

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5 From closed to open systemsOpen for Business:

The concept of open systems started around the late 1960s, where the first steps were taken to link different computer systems together across communications

networks. Following this, attention turned to the attached computer systems. Most practical implementations lie somewhere on the spectrum between open and closed

systems.

1. From virtualisation to cloud computing"Virtualisation" means a single mainframe computer can run separate instances of the same operating system at the same time; the creation of "Cloud Computing" from virtualisation came through the development of "orchestration", allowing many virtual machines to be managed across a range of physical hardware.

2. Open systems successAlmost all of the successful “Web” businesses launched in the last ten years have drawn on this base of Virtualised open systems, familiar names such as Google, Amazon, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter all operate in this way.

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6 Cloud computingOpen for Business:

The combination of virtualised open systems plus sophisticated orchestration leads to the concept of purchasing computing capability as a utility: cloud computing.

1. InfrastructureBasic virtual machines,

virtualised storage and network access are made available to

users.

2. PlatformThis adds a pre-configured

operating system and middleware.

3. SoftwareResponsibility for the application

software is transferred to the cloud service provider

4. Business ProcessComplete suite of applications to

perform a major business function.

5. Growth of the cloudCloud Computing is the fastest

growing service type in the outsourcing market (+48% growth last year, with total

spending of $5bn).

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7 How does Amadeus use open systems?Open for Business:

Altéa Customer Management System

At the operating system level, Amadeus is successfully transitioning from proprietary systems to Linux to run its leading Altéa Customer Management System for airlines.

Amadeus leading online innovationsLeading innovations online, including e-Retail, Dynamic Website Manager and Extreme Search have been built with extensive use of open source components in ways that would not be possible using legacy components.

Amadeus open source frameworkAmadeus ARIA™ Templates – the framework upon which Amadeus IT Group’s web solutions are based – has recently been made open source, allowing third party developers to use it without charge.

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8 Advantages for the business customerOpen for Business:

Access to greater innovation

The combination of open source software, open systems interoperability and open standards has created a

community of shared research and development and a pooling

of creative ideas. Those that show promise in testing and

development are implemented and adopted more quickly

Faster responses to changing requirements

Customer engagement and involvement and the influence of social networks place further demands on immediacy of process. Access

to a range of cost effective development tools, ability to scale rapidly and access to a global knowledge base, all favour the use of

the "open" approach.

Multi-system supportBusiness organisations use a wide variety of current legacy

systems all at different stages of their lifecycle. The ability,

through open systems, to draw on an extensive range of

standards and interfaces shared and developed over 20 years

can be a key differentiator.

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9 Advantages for the providerOpen for Business:

Access to skilled, motivated and innovative staff: A whole generation has grown up with access to both the Internet and open source. They want to work freely with these systems and tools.

Rapid adoption of new technology developments: New developments in hardware, network based storage and software are a regular occurrence. It is important to have timely access to these innovations which the open source community offers.

Drawing on the global community: The open source community now numbers in the millions, and includes software architects, analysts, designers, programmers and key universities. There are extensive opportunities for collaboration.

Avoidance of dependencies: Open Source limits restricted dependencies on single sources and therefore limits the pricing power.

Lower total cost of ownership: Open Source is generally free to obtain, but in order to compare costs we have to consider the total cost of ownership (TCO) over the lifetime of use of the software. Industry lore is that a TCO saving of around 20% is achievable.

Full visibility and confidence on the source code: Extensive public review and correction of the code can minimise the avenues for attack and offer a more rapid response and defense against attacks.

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10 Advantages for the travellerOpen for Business:

Greater choice and depth of servicesOpen source both enables greater (as well as faster) innovation and additionally makes it possible to deliver services that would not be financially viable under the economic model of proprietary software.

Democratisation of servicesFunctionality that would otherwise only be viable to provide on a limited scale or at a high price point – as it would be supported either by proprietary software or by manual activity – can be offered widely when supported by open source software.

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11 Key findingsOpen for Business:

Benefits for the business customer:

OSS is now applicable in the most demanding real-time processing environments.

Benefits for business providers:

Benefits for travellers:

The transition from closed to open systems represents a major integrity and fitness. Where key functions can move between countries or continents on demand, new approaches and working relationships are required.

OSS and cloud computing will have a great impact in computing and informatics

o Greater innovationo Faster response to changeo Ability to support heterogeneous systems.

o Access to motivated and skilled development and support staff o Reduced cost of ownership and independency from Monopily suppliers o Faster exploitation of new technology developments o Higher visibility and trust in the source code

o Greater choice and depth of services o Democratisation of services

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12 For your informationOpen for Business:

on our corporate Blog, where you'll find a series of posts from different authors on this topic.

Find out more about Open Source Systems (OSS)

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