SITA launches air transport command centre in Singapore

SITA today officially opened a global command centre in Singapore for the proactive monitoring and management of its communication and IT solutions used by hundreds of airlines and airports around the world. This follows the opening of SITA’s first centre in Montreal last year and supports the company’s ambition to deliver “zero downtime” to the air transport industry.

The centre, which has created more than 70 highly skilled, technical jobs in Singapore, will manage systems such as airport, web and mobile check-in; aircraft communications; baggage management; and border management systems.

For 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, SITA’s command centres are manned by teams of IT experts who have real-time visibility of the IT and communications systems in use at airports, in airlines and aircraft by SITA’s 3,200 customers. With its real-time visibility and sophisticated technology, SITA can identify issues and proactively initiate resolutions before service at its customer airlines and airports are impacted.

Dave Bakker, Senior Vice President, SITA Global Services, said: “The opening today brings SITA a step closer to our goal of ”zero downtime" for the air transport industry. No-one involved in this industry, which transports more than two and a half billion passengers each year, wants any disruption and at our command centres in Singapore and Montreal, we identify and fix issues before they escalate.

“Our decision to base our second centre in Singapore was due to a combination of SITA’s growing presence in Asia and the availability of highly skilled, multi-lingual personnel in the city. All our team members are at the very least bilingual and about 40% speak Mandarin, catering for the increasing number of SITA customers in China.”

SITA is the only provider to the industry that has command centres that are uniquely dedicated to the air transport community. Its experience and presence at hundreds of customer airline and airport sites worldwide gives SITA unique visibility at the edge of the air transport industry’s communications network and allows its specialists to monitor activity and to be aware of issues where customer connections are impacted. SITA uses next-generation monitoring tools to capture multi-vendor performance. In this way the command centre’s technical experts can identify problems along the entire IT chain before they become major issues.

The company has had a presence in Singapore for more than forty years and today’s opening expands the SITA team by more than 70 people. In total, 230 employees of more than 20 nationalities speaking more than 15 different languages are now based at SITA’s offices in Singapore. They serve more than 400 airline, airport and government customers in the Asia and the Pacific regions.