Disha Shah Ghosh - Mumbai Sriram Gopalswamy, VP – Site Reliability Engineering, Sabre Bengaluru GCC, in a conversation with Disha Shah Ghosh sheds light on the three innovations under progress.
Q. What are some of the travel tech innovations that Sabre is currently working on?
Currently there are three innovations that Sabre is working towards – first being adapting to NDC (New Distribution Capability), our position as both an aggregator and an airline IT provider allows us to deliver retailing solutions across the end-to-end customer journey, from offer creation all the way to fulfilment. Second, is the ‘Offer and Order Management’. This retail travel marketplace will allow airlines to tailor offers that are dynamically retailed and distributed across any channel and third, we are keenly researching and working towards Travel AI, in partnership with Google. This would mainly help OTAs (Online Travel Agents) or airlines to be able to personalise itinerary for travellers. These are the top three tech innovations that Sabre is planning to offer in the B2B space.
Q. Which among these innovations are ready for roll out?
We are working simultaneously on all three tech innovations. Everything depends on the market demand, and accordingly the innovations will be rolled out. One of the immediate innovations that we are looking to launch is the ‘Offer and Order management’.
Q. The travel industry deals with large amount of customer data. How are your products designed to protect and secure customer data?
Sabre Corporation is absolutely a GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) compliant organisation. We deal with numerous types of sensitive data. We spend a lot of effort to ensure all our employees understand the importance of data and how to handle it through periodic training and assessments. Since we are a complete GDPR compliant company, we make sure that we don’t look at individual records. We work with large data sets and generalise it. We don’t work on individual records, and no personally identifiable data is looked at or shared or taken for analysis.
Q. Enlighten us on the developments at Sabre’s Global Capability Center in Bengaluru.
Overall, we are a part of building cutting-edge technology that will change the way we travel. The Offer and Order Management, we also call it ‘Retail Intelligence’ is partly built from the Sabre GCC in Bengaluru. This innovation is a combined effort of different teams such as architects, R&D, product, sales, etc. On the People front, we have very flexible and open work culture, work timings, hybrid work models. On the people upliftment front, we make sure that employees are current, and they are provided with ample opportunities to up skill themselves. We conduct a lot of trainings to help employees deal with the hybrid work model. Overall, we provide an environment where our team members can thrive, have fun, and do their best work.
Q. What are the measures implemented by Sabre to enhance its technology transformation?
Technology transformation is an important piece of Sabre’s strategy. Over the past few years there has been steady investment towards tech transformation initiatives. Our focus is on migrating most of our compute to the public cloud which will help us innovate at a faster pace and deliver reliable, secure solutions faster to our customers. We currently have more than 60% of our compute in public clouds, this gives Sabre the agility and competitive edge.
Q. How are your tech products geared to tap the changing landscape of the aviation industry?
Our tech products help large airlines, airports to perform large functions and their operations with ease. Our products give the ability to the airlines, agencies and OTAs to get better distribution and reach across channels. There are several innovative offerings that are being worked on currently to help our customers do their business with ease.
