Farelogix, which likes to call itself "the last GNE standing," says it is taking a tack toward the open source community with a new application it will be offering travel agents for free, starting next March. Dubbing its open source application Hawkeye, the company's chief, Jim Davidson, tells us that agents can use Hawkeye with or without tying into the main Farelogix products, the FLX platform; agencies can also built the open source front-end package into a custom application. Farelogix, which will be the community coordinator and manager, may be taking a risk in making the source code available for free, but, he says, "a certain number of people will take the source code and come back to us for our black box," which is the FLX middleware.
"Traditional point-of-sale systems have become a real barrier to innovation in our industry," Davidson says. Much travel technology is in closed systems, and so the creativity has been on the business side, the negotiation side, he says. "This is not trivial, folks. It is very hard and very complex. From bitter personal experience and hard fought battles - I can assure you that creating this environment is a tough development. A VERY necessary change that can really open up the non-homogeneous reservations infrastructure," says Professor Sabena, a poster at the T2Impact blog. This is the blog used by Timothy O'Neill-Dunne.
A prime driver of the Hawkeye approach has been the unbundling of air fares from seats into attributes; Farelogix has as a prime customer Air Canada, the father of this approach.
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