Sabre teams with Microsoft so don’t mention Skype!
Sabre Corporation has signed a long-term strategic agreement with Microsoft – though don’t expect anybody who uses a Skype phone number to be too inspired by that news.
Announcing its agreement with Microsoft yesterday, Sabre said Microsoft would “empower the migration of Sabre’s commercial applications to Microsoft Azure by investing cloud development expertise and services in support of Sabre’s vision to lead an industry evolution in retailing, distribution and fulfilment”.
Earlier this month, Sabre announced a similar long-term deal with Amazon Web Services (AWS), which Sabre said was part of its “multi-vendor enterprise technology cloud migration”.
Microsoft is one of the three great internet titans, though not everyone is happy with all of its services. Skype users are still fuming after Microsoft acquired Skype and later stripped away a lot of Skype’s customisable options. Skype customers who had paid for a Skype phone number, found the businesslike voicemail greeting they had placed on Skype arbitrarily removed and replaced with a generic voicemail message, which made callers think they had got the wrong number.
Skype (under the Microsoft umbrella since Microsoft acquired it for about USD 9 billion) said in 2017 it had “removed the outgoing voicemail message as custom greetings are no longer supported”. So there.
The Sabre deal is very different, however, as Microsoft is not acquiring Sabre. The two companies will work as partners “to help Sabre better harness the power of its data and apply artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to create new services for hotel, agency and airline customers”.
Joe DiFonzo of Sabre
A Sabre statement on the Microsoft deal quoted Sabre’s chief information officer, Joe DiFonzo, saying: “The cloud presents an opportunity to rapidly innovate, create and deliver new business value for Sabre and our customers. Microsoft is more than a technology provider for us. Their team will be a key asset in our transformation, through proven leadership in the cloud space along with industry expertise and best practice methodology to help us realise our vision.”
Earlier this year, Sabre and Microsoft partnered on the pilot launch of an artificial-intelligence-powered chatbot, “Ella,” aimed at helping travel agencies serve clients “by fulfilling their most common service and support requests with smart technology”.
In developing the chatbot, Sabre leveraged Microsoft Bot Framework and a selection of Microsoft Cognitive Services, including Language Understanding Intelligent Service (LUIS) which provides simple tools to build language models, allowing any application or bot to understand natural language commands and react accordingly.
Bots can now sound surprisingly natural and non-robotic. See: Hear the robot travel voices of the future right now
A statement issued by Sabre yesterday said the link with Microsoft would “work to help Sabre better harness the power of its data and apply artificial intelligence and advanced analytics to create new services for hotel, agency and airline customers.
“Sabre technology processes over USD 120 billion of estimated travel spend each year, and every minute Sabre systems serve thousands of travel agents, board thousands of passengers, and process hundreds of bookings. As Sabre continues to evolve its cloud strategy, the company’s customers will be able to offer travellers more personalized and integrated experiences – especially important for Sabre’s strategy to innovate Beyond NDC and deliver next-generation retailing and distribution solutions.”
“Sabre is an established leader in the travel technology space, and we are excited to work closely with them to draw out data-driven insights that can reimagine the business of travel,” said Microsoft US president Kate Johnson.
“Microsoft’s cloud services will bring a range of new capabilities to Sabre that unlock even more value for their customers and will help them to succeed in transforming their industry with intelligent technologies.”
Written by Peter Needham
