Making good on its promise to develop a stronger vertical market presence to leverage its HP 3000 MPE/iX servers, Hewlett-Packard Corp has acquired Salt Lake City airline reservation software company Open Skies Inc for an undisclosed amount (CI No 3,455). HP has said it will specifically target mail order, healthcare, airline, manufacturing and credit union industries. HP says Open Skies is its passport into the small to medium-sized airlines transaction-based business process service industry. HP declined to say how the acquisition would affect its existing relationship with reservation giant Sabre Group Holdings Inc. Open Skies folds into HP’s Commercial Services Division, where, HP claims, it can save up to 60% on the usual $5 cost of processing passenger reservation services. The passenger ticketing and distribution service market is worth $35bn. HP’s European airlines business manager Hans Derksen refused to speculate on potential revenues from the deal or a percentage of the market it hopes to win. Open Skies software suite consists of two parts. OpenRes is a reservation system using HP 3000 hardware and a Turbo Image/SQL database, with Take Flight as the GUI. The second part is RMS, Open Skies’ Revenue Management System, for forecasting and optimizing revenues from the OpenRes database. Open Skies also has an internet booking system channel and automatic check-in kiosks.
