Sharjah Airport Authority has developed airport management applications that could soon be used by other airlines across the world. Among the packages, which were developed using Informix tools and databases, are a flight information system, flight operations system, and a cargo system with separate modules for handling imports and exports.
Sharjah Airport hopes to market its applications through Informix and has worked with the company’s local partner, Infodata, to coordinate any global expansion. "Infodata has sent a request on our behalf to Informix in the UK, and it has been forwarded to the US," Dr. S. Sridhar, manager of Information Services, Sharjah Airport Authority, told ACN. "If Informix agrees to market our applications, what it means is that when another airport buys an Informix platform, they will not have to spend valuable time and effort creating applications. They will be able to buy ready made and tested ones," he explained.
Buying applications that fit comfortably into an airport environment is not easy, particularly
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when open systems is an important consideration. That is why the Sharjah authority feels there is a market for its Informix-based applications.
"We originally decided to develop our own applications in house because the software that is generally available to do the things we need is all proprietary. There are very few open applications that we could use immediately because airport handling is a very narrow field," said Dr. S. Sridhar.
Sharjah Airport is also currently developing applications for its own use, on an Oracle platform. "There are advantages to developing different kinds of applications on two different platforms. In some ways, Informix has better features than Oracle, and in other ways, Oracle is better than Informix. We have put a lot energy and invested a lot of time in developing packages using Informix, and that is where the majority of our development has been done. As a user of both however, I must say that there is absolutely no critical point at which either of the packages is better than the other. We have increased our investment in both Informix and Oracle," he added.
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