he mission of Sabre Holdings is

to connect people with the world’s

greatest travel possibilities by selling

travel products and providing distri-

bution and technology solutions for

the travel industry. The Southlake, Texas-

based company supports travelers, travel

agents, corporations and travel suppliers

through its companies, which include

Travelocity, Sabre Travel Network and

Sabre Airline Solutions.

Sabre’s success in accomplishing this

mission is evident through the much-

lauded achievements of its popular online

travel agency, Travelocity. Travelocity has

been a leading Internet travel site for years

with Internet technologies that have put

complete control of travel plans on the

customer’s desktop. Much of Travelocity’s

success is credited to its innovative use

of a Teradata enterprise data warehouse

(EDW), which has been at the heart of its

efforts since 1999. In the 2006 World Travel

Awards, Travelocity won the “World’s

Leading Travel Internet Site” for the ninth

consecutive year. More than 150,000 travel

agents from 80,000 travel agencies around

the globe participated in the online voting.

As the director of data warehousing,

Michael Hawkins was a key player in

developing active data warehousing for

Travelocity. With that experience,

Hawkins moved to Sabre Holdings in

June 2006 to develop an EDW initiative

for the parent company.

The impetus for creating an enterprise

data focus at Sabre was the success and

continued growth at Travelocity. Sabre has

recently experienced rapid growth, and

the company quickly realized that it was

at the center of opportunity for tremen-

dous cost savings through data mart

consolidation. Teradata Magazine recently

spoke with Hawkins about the direction

Sabre is taking with its data warehouse

Experience countsBuilding on successes, Sabre Holdings enhances offerings to the travel industry.by Jackie Zack

TeradataMagazine.com

Photo

grap

hy by Lisa M

eans

CASE STUDY

Michael Hawkins, directorof data warehousing at SabreHoldings, discusses how activedata warehousing affects theoverall customer experience.

T

PAGE 1 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5375

and how this direction will help the

company grow even more.

Q What are the areas where Teradata,

as an active data warehouse, will bring

value to your organization?

A Sabre’s customers can be travelers,

travel agents, corporations or

suppliers. Our goal, with an active data

warehouse, is to provide merchandising

and to make offers relevant and timely

based on a customer’s historical context,

and then providing that knowledge

through various touchpoints, such as

an online travel agency or a call center.

Using Travelocity’s experience with the

online channel, it has been shown that the

data warehouse can be used in an opera-

tional setting to retrieve historical context

about the particular person, including

shopping trends and destinations of in-

terest. This helps the online application

craft a more pertinent and relevant offer

to enhance the customer experience and

help us close the sale.

The ability to create a more per-

sonalized, relevant experience for the

customer is a major goal at Sabre. In a

nutshell, it’s the marriage of the historical

context of the party to the events that

are occurring in real time, and that’s the

union that happens with the operational

systems accessing the historical data in

the active data warehouse.

Q Can you cite a good example of this

marriage?

A One example that is pertinent to

most people is finding the best

travel deal. If a customer is shopping

online for flights and hotels in Las Vegas,

the data warehouse can provide knowl-

edge of that shopping behavior even

though the customer isn’t buying

anything yet. From a supplier perspec-

tive, the data warehouse searches for the

best-priced flights based on different

carriers. When we see someone shopping

a particular market, we can build a

campaign and bring that to his or her

attention. You’ve already got interest—

the customer wants to go to Vegas. If

the customer sees an ad pertinent to

that, it helps generate a better customer

experience and it helps us increase the

conversion rate and close the sale. In this

case the touchpoint was the Web site,

but it could easily have been the call

center or any means of communica-

tion. It’s just the ability to create a

more personalized, relevant experience

for the customer.

Q What competitive edge does active data

warehousing provide your company?

A An industry like travel has so

many participants with everybody

obviously trying to compete for the same

market share. Sabre needs to be able to

offer our suppliers a way to compete

favorably within the market, so we are

looking to use the historical data that’s

contained within the data warehouse to

help carriers better market their products.

Q Is privacy protection an issue in

this case?

A We don’t release competitors’ detailed

data; we’re very protective of data and

we have contractual obligations to protect.

But in the case of a hotelier who’s agreed

to share an aggregate view of some com-

petitive information within a market, we’re

able to provide that capability. That will

ultimately lead them to work with us more

closely and to start talking about active

capability with people who are either on

our Web site, their Web site or one of our

partners’ Web sites.

Q Will operational [front-end] systems

benefit from near real-time con-

nectivity to Teradata?

A Today, the agency channel has a lot

of connections to the back end for

reporting, so we deliver products that give

agencies the view into the business they’re

driving through Sabre. We’ve got some new

products that are pretty exciting coming out

in the agency space that will give them a

more visualized view of the data rather than

just straight reports. We’ll start seeing very

visual displays of data—things like maps—

going out to the agency channel.

Then again, it depends on the context. The

travel market is so big, especially when you’re

looking at it from Sabre, that whether it’s the

agencies, the suppliers or the travelers, we

have to work within the confinements of the

data agreements that we have with suppliers

and others. But from time to time, a supplier

CASE STUDY

“The power of Teradata provides the capability toadd historical context to the operational system andgives you knowledge you wouldn’t otherwise have.”

—Michael Hawkins, Sabre Holdings

PAGE 2 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5375

or partner has an idea that they want to pur-

sue and we have the capability because of the

breadth of the view from the value chain—

all the way from the supplier through the

agencies to the traveler. We can help them

more proactively market their products.

And that capability puts us in a unique

position to be able to use that data in an

active or operational way.

Q How do you look at availability

differently now that operations

are based more heavily on the system?

A We have had a data warehouse at Sabre

Holdings for about four years, pri-

marily for a traditional back-office data

warehousing view. When we started moving

into active data warehousing when I was at

Travelocity, our operational uptime, metrics,

SLAs [service level agreements] and capa-

bilities became much different because

now you’re in the operational space and

the revenue-generating systems, so people

have a different way to look at your uptime

characteristics. Teradata is an extremely

stable system so we’ve been able to enjoy

availability metrics that are 99.4 percent or

99.5 percent. But now we are heading into a

place where people expect and demand that

the system is up all the time, and that means

we are moving into a dual-active environ-

ment. Not just because of the merchandising

or the active capability, but because there’s a

business decision in there that says, “Am I

going to pay for redundant systems or am

I willing to take a risk for that 0.5 percent

of the time that I’m down?”

Q Are there technical requirements or

changes occurring as you plan and

implement more active applications?

A There’s a whole different set of expec-

tations that came on us. Once we’re

able to start measuring the value of the

system by the hour because of its operational

use, then all of a sudden we can quickly

justify the need to build out redundant sys-

tems and become dual active. On a typical

host environment at Sabre we have a number

of systems that are very expensive to run and

maintain, but their uptime characteristics are

very impressive. So we are starting to build

out that dual-active capability to better mer-

chandise for our partners and suppliers and,

at the same time, build a bulletproof infra-

structure. It won’t go down. We are also

starting to move into operational reporting

and replacing applications that have histor-

ically been on a host environment. All of this

is mission-critical.

Q What changes in culture, training or

governance are taking place within your

organization as you implement these projects?

A It starts to change the role of the people

within the data warehouse and business

intelligence [BI] groups because if we view

ourselves as “back office” and we’re not really

mission-critical then there’s a certain way we

address projects in that environment that is a

little bit more “loose” than if you were in an

operational setting. One of the things we

noticed was the mental way that we look at

ourselves. We’re part of the operation’s po-

tential to earn revenue so that puts more

focus on our ability to measure and monitor

our uptime characteristics and how we re-

spond to incidents.

We are still going through a lot of that

at Sabre. After taking an active look at

enterprise data warehousing, we eventually

hired new people and started changing the

way we view the work that we do, buttoning

down a lot of the processes and really starting

to fine tune our procedures. Our goal is to

build the foundation to go toward the future

through referencing the work at Travelocity

and learning from what others have done at

other companies. We’ve got some good

experience here.

Q How are you “selling” these projects

internally?

A We’ve got our foot halfway into active

data warehousing at Sabre. Because

Sabre has grown so quickly, we have a lot of

data islands. At the very senior levels there’s

agreement that centralizing the data is im-

portant. However, at a tactical level our busi-

ness units have their own priorities—but we

have been starting to get together on this vi-

sion over the past few months. We’ve worked

with some of the key senior executives to

help address that challenge. Travelocity is a

little bit smaller so it’s pretty easy to get top-

down, across-the-board agreement to be able

to build that active capability pretty quickly.

A company like Sabre that has many mature

systems and departments, as well as people

who have been largely responsible for key el-

ements of the business for a long time, takes

a little bit of navigation to work through

some of those culture issues to see the value

of “Store it once, use it many times.” And so,

in some respects, a lot of what we need to do

in the next few months is to educate.

Q With the operational system con-

nected to Teradata, what is the

value of the mixed workloads that are

now running concurrently?

A The fact that you can do traditional

data warehousing with the reporting

and the response time needed and also have

mixed workload capability pushing toward

the operational functions puts Teradata

in a pretty unique spot. We’re definitely

leveraging that capability. We are aiming

to store data once in its most granular form

and then use that same data as the basis for

operational analytics. If you can get that

mixed workload, great, because if it’s there,

why move it if there’s nothing but expense

involved? The Teradata system gives a nor-

malized data model that is flexible and has

lower maintenance. Very few platforms can

do that. The power of Teradata provides the

capability to add historical context to the

operational system and gives you knowledge

you wouldn’t otherwise have.

PAGE 3 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5375

Q Do you have any advice for other

companies that are moving in an

active direction?

A Some people tend to view the data

warehouse as, “We’re going to go out

and try to own the world.” The truth is, we

can’t own the world. The world is too big,

and we need people to help describe it for

us. There are a number of independent

data marts out there that people have built

and have become experts of. Our approach

to that problem is going to be to work with

them to bring that capability into the data

warehouse and use their expertise in order

to build and maintain it.

It’s a difference between a stewardship

mentality of the data versus a strict

command and control. While we will

have processes, procedures and stan-

dards, it really, truly is going to involve

working in cooperation with these

groups. Once you gain the trust of these

people and the business units that own

the data marts, selling the projects be-

comes very easy. When you start doing

your justifications and your ROI [return

on investment] projects, the cost of

“Store it once, use it many times”

becomes a pretty sweet picture. T

Jackie Zack, a Michigan-based business,

technical and feature writer, has written

for several trade journals.

Behind the solution: Sabre Holdings

Database: Teradata Database V2R6.0.2

Server: 4-node Teradata 5380 Server; 6-node Teradata 5400 Server; and1-node Teradata 4400 Server

Users: 200 (5 concurrent)

Data Model: Third Normal Form

Operating System: UNIX MP-RAS

Storage: 1.9TB

Teradata Utilities: FastExport, FastLoad, MultiLoad, Teradata Dynamic QueryManager, Teradata Manager, Teradata TPump, Teradata UtilityPack - ODBC Driver, JDBC Driver and SQL Assistant

PAGE 4 | Teradata Magazine | September 2007 | ©2007 Teradata Corporation | AR-5375