For whatever reason, mainframe systems are so deeply entrenched, that all of the major Global Distribution System [0] providers seem to have their legacy systems wrapped in modern "serialization facades" to produce the XML or JSON that gets consumed by external systems.
There are probably a hundred ways to rationalize why. Inertia, lock-in, obstinate grey breards refusing to retire and holding infrastructure hostage until they die... , if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it-even-when-it-is-broke, "we can't afford to stop the world for your cargo-cult modernization rewrite, sonny...", too big to fail, on and on...
It's a pretty weird situation, but by my estimate, it's probably going to require totally new airlines rolling their own systems from scratch, in parallel isolation, next to the huge legacy carriers as they continue to operate, in order to transition, modernize and unseat the current technology. That seems to be the way things work in industries this big.
Fast food, banking, telecommunications. All of them have examples of modern upstarts that are now world-wide staples, simply because they started from scratch with more modern efficient systems, as they continue to co-exist alongside dinosaurs that still haven't gone away.
FWIW, Amadeus has been working for years and years on a migration away from IBM mainframes. The project took hundreds of man-years and it's nearing completion very soon (I mean, maybe this or next year, that's "very soon" in the GDS scale).
But as you can imagine, migrating legacy systems to new hardware with the spec "it should work as the old system" is not the most sexy job and not the easiest to recruit great programmers for.
(I work for Amadeus, but on unrelated projects - though I have friends who worked on the migration).
>There are probably a hundred ways to rationalize why
It's just a difficult problem to solve. Many capable organizations have tried in earnest, including one Google bought for $700M. Thus far, the non TPF solutions can only scale to medium sized airlines.
It's not impossible, it's just a huge investment, and the payoff is lower than other potential uses of the same money. That's why all previous efforts stalled.
There are probably a hundred ways to rationalize why. Inertia, lock-in, obstinate grey breards refusing to retire and holding infrastructure hostage until they die... , if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it-even-when-it-is-broke, "we can't afford to stop the world for your cargo-cult modernization rewrite, sonny...", too big to fail, on and on...
It's a pretty weird situation, but by my estimate, it's probably going to require totally new airlines rolling their own systems from scratch, in parallel isolation, next to the huge legacy carriers as they continue to operate, in order to transition, modernize and unseat the current technology. That seems to be the way things work in industries this big.
Fast food, banking, telecommunications. All of them have examples of modern upstarts that are now world-wide staples, simply because they started from scratch with more modern efficient systems, as they continue to co-exist alongside dinosaurs that still haven't gone away.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_distribution_system