Sabre and Google developing framework to transform future of travel: Sriram Gopalswamy

Sabre Corp, Bangalore, headquartered in Southlake, Texas, USA, serves customers in over 160 countries, with almost 8,000 employees globally. Sabre India started its operations in the year 2005 and has been awarded the great place to work in 2009, 2016, and 2021.

Sabre’s focus is to create tech transformation in aviation, travel, tourism and hospitality, and to serve the best to its clientele through technology-driven platforms, be it data and analytics, AWS, or GCP. Sabre operates travel and hospitality solutions in India, with its GCC center in Bengaluru.

Sriram Gopalswamy, VP, Information systems, Sabre Global Capability Center, tells us more. Excerpts from an interview:

DQ: Everyone wants and talks about having a robust infrastructure. Do we have a robust infrastructure that is 24x7, and supports the customer needs without any glitches?

Sriram Gopalswamy: Sabre’s vision is to create a new marketplace for personalized travel by 2025. We remain committed to our multi-year technology transformation initiative, that will allow us to improve operational agility and revolutionize how we deliver software.

We have state-of-art Operational Control Centers in Bengaluru and Dallas that work in a follow-the-sun model and offers 24x7 proactive monitoring for all our applications, and takes necessary steps in reducing the impact for our customers in case of outages. There is a great deal of focus on cybersecurity and availability of applications, so that our customers are able to do business without any challenges.

We are on a mission to modernize our infrastructure and applications. Our 10-year agreement with Google Cloud is one of the steps that we have taken to make this possible. We have been migrating our applications to GCP (Google Cloud Platform) for the past several months, and a majority of our key applications are currently running in GCP.

An organization-wide effort is currently underway to migrate our applications to the cloud, where our engineers are harnessing all the advantages that a multi-zone and multi-region cloud provides us, in order to facilitate this transition. This enables us to deliver superior services to our customers which is scalable, highly available, and boasts of cutting-edge security.

DQ: Therefore, what can we expect next in this space?

Sriram Gopalswamy: We have already moved around 60% of our infrastructure into Google Cloud. It is not just the migration of applications to the cloud, we are also modernizing the way we run and maintain our software. We have begun practicing SRE (Site Reliability Engineering) principles, to ensure that our customers get unparalleled reliability and to help our internal teams to get features out to our customers faster. SRE adoption is also helping our teams to reduce toil and improve focus on availability and reliability.

It’s our constant endeavor to improve the security of our applications and environments. To accomplish this, we are investing on several industry leading WAF and other cybersecurity tools.

DQ: How is the travel and tourism industry evolving, and how does it transform travel tech?

Sriram Gopalswamy: We are seeing a slow, but steady revival of the travel industry happening post the pandemic. Domestic travel and hotel bookings are showing excellent recovery, promising exponential growth in the near future. We are very confident that this upsurge will make travel and hospitality suppliers invest more on tech, to differentiate their services from their competitors and meet the demands of the modern-day travellers.

Travel tech is one of the areas where tech penetration is the least, when compared to other industries like retail, fintech, BFSI, and manufacturing. This gives Sabre a unique advantage, and an opportunity to innovate in the area of personalized travel, and create an ecosystem for travel suppliers to come together and offer their services on a robust, travel marketplace. I am very confident that these tech offerings will help augment traveller experiences.

DQ: What is the Impact of the partnership with Google?

Sriram Gopalswamy: The Sabre and Google teams are partnering to develop a framework for our companies to work side-by-side, in an effort to transform the future of travel.

Our customers will benefit from the Sabre-Google partnership, which will provide them with newer innovative products at their disposal. The deep technical expertise that Sabre has in the Travel industry, coupled with our proven machine learning/ artificial intelligence capabilities powered by Google, will allow customers to operate more efficiently, grow revenue, and offer personalized traveller experiences through next-gen technology.

Our innovation efforts are focused on redefining the travel experience, improving personalization, and negotiating hurdles for airlines, agencies and travellers. The possibilities are endless, and the future is bright!