High-flying service

Catering for the IT needs of the world’s airline industry is a formidable challenge. As the industry’s IT supplier SITA signs an historic partnership with Virgin Atlantic, VitAL editor Matt Bailey asks SITA regional vice president for Northern Europe, Rob Watkins how the company manages a truly global industry.

SITA, a leading specialist in air transport communications and IT solutions has announced that it is partnering with Virgin Atlantic as the airline’s Network Guardian with primary responsibility for all of Virgin’s voice and data IT services. The five-year, multi-million dollar partnership covers more than 100 sites worldwide, progressively moving full responsibility for a diverse range of IT services from multiple providers to SITA including; international and domestic IP VPN, voice (IPT and PBX), managed LAN, cabling, core network support, vendor management services and the all important area of service management.

“A large part of what we do is dealing with the world as it develops,” explains Rob Watkins, SITA regional vice president for Northern Europe. “For instance, we are now in a game-changing recession and our service has to reflect this. We have to offer the industry value for money; the best balance between price, functionality and risk. What is unique now is that you have to work together for a solution and we have worked with Virgin Atlantic to achieve that mix.”

SITA was set up in 1949 to provide communications services to the nascent international airline industry. These days it delivers and manages business solutions for airlines, airports, GDS, government and other customers over the world’s most extensive network, which forms the communications backbone of the global air transport industry.

“A group of airlines got together to share a communications infrastructure,” says Watkins. “Initially this was to save money, but now we provide communications and IT across the industry from special messaging to infrastructure, desktops and ticketing. In our business, service management has to be really boringly dependable; always there, effective, reliable and predictable, day-in, day-out.”

And the members are not just buying-in product, it’s a full blown service. Created and owned by the air transport community, SITA is the community’s dedicated partner for information and communications technology. As a team of industry experts, its know-how is based on working with customers across the global air transport community. In fact, almost every airline and airport in the world does business with SITA.

As you would expect, the aviation industry is a highly distributed business with SITA clients all around the world, including some in very difficult to support regions. SITA has to have a truly global capability to cover this range, from single person operations right up to the largest airports in the world. “I always think of it as the only truly global company,” claims Watkins. “All the others are multinationals, SITA is the only really global organisation. It has to be because aviation is a very widely distributed business.”

One of the main methods to support this global network is with ITIL. “We’ve been making huge investments in the ITIL infrastructure,” says Watkins, who is foundation level ITIL himself. “It has brought us consistency. When you’re global you need to have a single way of supporting the customer. Service levels and delivery and best practise have to be across the whole organisation. This ensures that service management is deployed consistently all around the world. The point is that ITIL delivers happier customers and our services have been improving year on year, but you have to have robust methods of measuring performance or you’re not doing a proper job.”

SITA uses a formal customer satisfaction survey process driven from its board which is made up of representatives from the airlines. “Our board members are all from the airlines and they insist on key performance indicators (KPIs) for customer satisfaction,” explains Watkins. “The most important thing is that every year we have to improve, so we need a robust mechanism to get customer feedback. We have to know where we’re not performing in order to do something about it. We get a formal report of performance linked to customer satisfaction scores and this is how we measure our success.”

This feedback mechanism is crucial to delivering the all important value for money. “Giving value for money is always on my mind,” states Watkins, “I go to bed thinking about it and I wake up thinking about it.”

SITA relies on surveys on IT trends at airlines and airports , in addition to a global passenger survey for guidance. “We have been doing this for 11 years,” says Watkins, “so trends are easy to spot. One thing is crystal clear; there is a big change when you compare 2008 with 2009. You can see a massive change in thinking about IT spend. The impetus has changed from a culture of increasing spend to one of cutting. And many radically changed what they planned to spend any available funds on. Contract renegotiation and vendor consolidation were the top two trends in the IT sector.”

It’s a trick the UK Government have tried and the jury is still out on whether and how well it has worked, but can companies save in the long term by investing in the short term? There certainly seem to be a number of ways this could work for IT users. “Many are looking at cloud computing as a way of driving out cost,” says Watkins. “Cloud, mobility and software-as-a-service (SaaS) all make excellent sense for the aviation industry because it is so widely distributed.”

Airlines in particular have tended to suffer from the organic growth of their voice and data solutions which in many cases has resulted in complex, unmanaged interfaces, the existence of non-standard solutions, major service overlaps and consequently, a high cost of support. The role SITA will play at Virgin Atlantic, of Network Guardian, includes the standardisation and simplification of the delivery of these services, driving cost savings and improved service levels.

“As Virgin Atlantic’s Network Guardian, SITA will be in a position to focus on the airline’s overall business objectives rather than the delivery of any single, specific technology,” comments Rob Watkins. “The immediate cost savings will be strengthened by our experience and understanding of the air transport industry. Virgin will also benefit from our drive for innovation and continuous improvement in the provision of IT and communications.”

Tim Livett, director of Finance and Business Services at Virgin Atlantic commented: “Our mission at Virgin Atlantic dictates that we grow a profitable airline and to achieve this we constantly examine every element of our business. By consolidating the delivery of voice and data services from approximately 40 suppliers to a single supplier, SITA, we will improve the delivery of a high quality service to the business while we are achieving significant economies of scale and reducing the cost of delivery.”

Matthew Billings, head of IT Services at Virgin Atlantic Airways, added: “The financial savings are fundamental to our goal of driving down the overall cost base of delivery of IT to the business but as head of IT I am also assured that our newly extended partnership with SITA will enable us to deliver other strategic initiatives including global supplier consolidation, service standardisation and improved Service Levels to our end users. Our company values are well aligned and our teams are closely integrated – we see the SITA team as a seamless extension of our own IT department. We will have the added benefits of simplified supplier management, faster deployment, improved reporting and reduced incident resolution times. All of these are hugely valuable in addition to the monetary savings.”

 “We wouldn’t be doing our job properly if we didn’t improve,” says Watkins. “So we have signed off investment in the next generation of products and services, especially service management. We are investing in service and training the staff along with new facilities and next generation tools.”

As with his customers, for Rob Watkins it’s the journey that’s important. “You can never sit back and think you’ve got to where you want to be,” he says. “It’s the journey that’s important, not the destination and investing in service management is just as valid as investment in products, but we’ve got to strike the right balance. You have to look at your service in the whole. Even if you have the latest and most advanced functionality, you’re still only as strong as your weakest link.”

www.sita.aero

The history of SITA

1949: SITA is founded by eleven airlines including Air France, Swissair, TWA, British European Airways Corporation (BEAC), British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC) and British South American Airways.

1950: SITA opens its first telecommunications centre in Rome. Information is manually transmitted using perforated tape and teleprinters. This is the first generation of the world’s largest network.

1966: The first computer adapted for message switching opens in Frankfurt.

1969: SITA’s High Level Network is implemented. This leads to the development of the world’s first worldwide packet switching network dedicated to business traffic. This is the second generation of the world’s largest communications network.

1971: Interactive data exchange between terminals becomes available. SITA implements its first satellite processor. This vastly expands the number of locations to be equipped with computerised systems.

1981: The SITA network expands with the introduction of the Data Transport Network. This is the third generation of the world’s largest network.

1989: SITA membership is extended to include computer reservations systems, aerospace manufacturers, tour operators, airfreight forwarders, airport authorities and other related air transport organisations.

1991: The Mega-Transport Network becomes operational. This forms the fourth generation of the world’s largest network.

1995: SITA launches AeroNet as the intranet for the aerospace and air transport community.

1996: Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) technology begins to be installed over the SITA network. It enables the transport of mixed voice and data traffic. This is the fifth generation of the world’s largest network.

2004: CHAMP Cargosystems is jointly set up by SITA Cargo (UK) Ltd with Cargolux. CHAMP is the world’s only company solely dedicated to the provision of IT solutions to the air cargo industry, with over 60 airline customers.

.aero launches. SITA sponsors the .aero Top Level Domain name on behalf of the aviation community. .aero is reserved exclusively for aviation.

2005: OnAir launches. OnAir, a joint venture with SITA and Airbus, is the leading pioneer of inflight communications. The service brings the use of mobile phones and other personal communications devices on board aircraft.

2006: With industry trends moving towards communications and IT convergence, SITA consolidates into a single organisation. It focuses on providing global integrated communications and IT services to the air transport industry.

2008: SITA consolidates its leadership in border management by becoming the first IT provider worldwide to receive US government approval to transmit passenger data at check-in, based on its Advance Passenger Information Quick Query (AQQ) service.

2009: SITA commemorates 60 years of working for the air transport industry.