How significant is the travel vertical for Sonata
Software?
Travel is a big focus area for Sonata. The company has made one of the
largest investment in travel (TUI Infotech). In fact, TTL vertical brings a
large chunk of our revenues. We have strategic partnerships with industry bodies
like IATA, and analyst like PhoCusWright, Forrester and partnerships with IT
majors like Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and IBM. In this big vertical, we are looking
at three major areastravel agencies, network-carrier airlines and car-rental
solutions. One area at which we are also looking at is offering services to
software companies like providing airline software.
What are the various solutions that you are working on?
We have various segment-specific solutions like SonnetPCI, Sonnet4Airlines,
ARMOR, and SonnetTRAVEL.
SonnetPCI is Sonatas solution accelerator for PCI-DSS
compliance and for secure card information storage and transaction.
Sonnet4Airlines is a portal based collaboration platform to meet an airlines
need for communication, information management and business processes. Armor is
a pricing decision support system that can help an airline to respond quicker to
dynamic market needs on product pricing. SonnetTRAVEL is our high performance,
scalable, modular, e-commerce engine and distribution platform supporting
advanced B2B and B2C features for the travel intermediaries. Another product,
Hotel Selling platform (HSP), is part of our e-commerce solution suite,
SonnetTRAVEL targeted at midsize hotels and aggregates, enables consolidation of
hotel inventory data in one central data repository.
How TUI has been helpful in this process?
Sonata Software acquired 50.1% stake in TUI InfoTec in 2006. TUI InfoTec is
the erstwhile IT services arm of the travel major TUI, whose applications and IT
infrastructure systems it develops, maintains and supports worldwide. This
demonstrates our edge over competition. The joint venture gave us reach to
markets such as Germany, Poland, Austria and Switzerland. We have 450 people,
who work for TUI Infotech. So the domain knowledge is astounding, and fairly
in-depth. The domain knowledge comes from the group and software development
comes from us. We, also have relation with TUI UK and TUI Germany which gives us
close to $150 mn of business.
Akanksha Prasad/CIOL
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in