Back to SITA ATI Messaging Journal Q1 2009

Editorial

Around the world thousands of ATI messages are sent and received every minute of every hour, and major players in the ATI now exchange messages with hundreds of partners every day.

SITA ATI Messaging has for many years acted as a global ATI post office for operational message exchanges, providing all the terminals that have an ATI standard address with the simple, safe, reliable & secure delivery that's more important than ever.

SITA is keen to enhance its ATI Messaging offering by introducing a more coordinated approach and a more open dialogue with our customers, with the objective of meeting the evolving requirements of the industry. SITA is engaged in numerous initiatives to modernize ATI communication and is in touch with many new players in the ATI community, and we will need to get your feedback on these initiatives. By sharing our views and hearing your opinions, we will endeavour to adapt and shape our Messaging portfolio to best meet your business needs.

The launch of the SITA ATI Messaging Journal is one part of this new approach. In a world of Internet communications, it is important to debate, develop and demonstrate the relevant ATI messaging and integration services and make the best use of emerging standards and technologies and create services with increased value and cost effectiveness to the community. Indeed, in the current economic context, it is more important than ever.

The ATI will always need a simple, trustworthy way of interconnecting its systems to the many partners involved. As the industry evolves - to include more exchanges with regulatory and security authorities, for example, and greater data exchange with pilots in the cockpit - secure and reliable messaging will continue to play a central and vital role in the ATI in enabling these business-critical communications.

SITA's ATI Messaging service was launched 20 years before the roots of the Internet Protocol were planted in 1970, and it has survived during IP's rise to ubiquity - indeed SITA has accommodated Messaging (as well as its other services) to take advantage of IP technology and continues to invest heavily each year to ensure the service's efficiency and performance.

ATI application migration to web-based services is the next emerging challenge for ATI Messaging. If we take the World Wide Web Consortium's definition of a web service, however - as 'a software system designed to support interoperable machine-to-machine interaction over a network' - that would apply quite well to the SITA ATI Messaging service too.

We are conscious of the need to progress in order to keep up with the increasingly complex uses of our Messaging service, and the varying needs of different applications for immediate delivery, definite delivery or both - as well as the need to support the Type B format and the Type X interface, as well as connections via an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB).

We will continue to invest in our messaging capability - recognizing the need to better address the specific uses of the service by different ATI business processes - in order to stay competitive with alternative technologies and service providers. At the same time we will strive to ensure our messaging capabilities are fully-integrated with community applications under development.

To help us achieve these aims we are creating a Messaging Steering Group, to give customers the opportunity to provide guidance on the short and long term strategy for the Messaging service; this is described in more detail in one of the articles in this journal.

In closing, I should say that I will inevitably apply to the Messaging service some of my 20 years' experience in aircraft communications - with the intention of bringing out the unique essence of messaging, linking it up to the aircraft and enabling it to flourish in the twenty-first century.

Philip Clinch
Vice President, Aircraft Communications & Messaging

For more information, please contact messaging.marketing@sita.aero or visit www.sita.aero/content/community-messaging.

Editorial

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