CIO Perspective: Software Intelligence Puts SITA in Front of Airlines’ Back-Office App Issues

Rarely does anybody think about back-office systems until there’s a problem…that is unless your back-office systems are crucial to the lives of more than four billion airline passengers each year. Reliability is imperative in the airline industry, and Software Intelligence is helping make that imperative a 24/7/365 reality.

From the Air Canada computer telecommunications issue in March or the global computer outage that impacted seven airlines and as many major airports around the world last September, computer downtime is a continuing problem for the airline industry. With so many people dependent upon the reliability of the travel industry’s IT systems, Software Intelligence – insight into complex software structure – should be a standard part of developing these systems for the travel industry.

CAST recently sat down with Pradipt Kapoor, vice president of products and solutions engineering at SITA, a multinational information technology company that provides IT and telecommunication services to the air transport industry, to get his perspective on how Software Intelligence guides his organization when it develops products for 400 airlines and 2,500 airports around the world.



“The key element of value for us from Software Intelligence is through the lifecycle of the product, but also the different dimensions that we need the intelligence for,” said Kapoor. “The intelligence at an executive level, for myself, is more at a landscape and holistic portfolio level. The intelligence needed by my developers and technical staff is more at the code or infrastructure level.”

Kapoor says SITA uses Software Intelligence not only to guide application development, but also to help make decisions related to business risk. He says, being able to view “the facts and the insight” enhances the accuracy of the company’s decisions and improves software quality.

For SITA, software quality becomes more critical each year as the number of people traveling via air increases. Kapoor says incorporating Software Intelligence into the very fabric of software development is how SITA ensures the dependability of its products.

“That number [of airline passengers] is set to double and will continue to increase,” said Kapoor. “Any disruption at an airport or at an airline can have significant impact.”

“More than that, our systems are used today for flight planning, and weight and balance of aircraft, where any error in the system could lead to planes falling out of the sky or lives being lost. Our job, and the intelligence that we need is to ensure the reliability of our products from a software quality perspective and from a cybersecurity perspective.”