Sabre Enterprise Architect Dave Hollander, already well known in technology circles as a co-creator of Extensible Markup Language (XML), was recently honored by OpenTravel Alliance with the Tom Grubbs Award.
The OpenTravel Alliance (OTA) board of directors bestows the honor annually to an individual who has demonstrated dedication to OpenTravel through vision and innovation.
“OpenTravel is defined by the caliber of its participating members, and we are fortunate indeed to have Dave Hollander working with us,” says Valyn Perini, CEO of OpenTravel. “Dave brings a deep knowledge of XML and enterprise architecture to us, allowing us to better serve the needs of the entire travel industry.”
The Tom Grubbs Award is named for a founding father and instrumental participant in OpenTravel Alliance. This award is bestowed by the OpenTravel board of directors on an individual who has shown a dedication to OpenTravel through vision and innovation.
“There are a lot of volunteers who deserve recognition,” Hollander said. “Member collaboration is fundamental to OpenTravel and it’s been an outstanding experience.”
Hollander has been with Sabre for nearly five years as part of the Chief Technology Officer’s organization. He has worked in a number of areas including service oriented architecture, XML schema, and Web services. In other words, he helps build Sabre’s technology literally from the ground up – the stuff you rarely see but absolutely need.
As a co-creator of XML, Hollander’s work literally touches millions of people every day. At Sabre alone, we process more than 300 million transactions a day using XML.
Hollander has been a tireless champion and worker on OTA’s initiative to enhance today’s XML standards. He serves as co-chair of the OpenTravel Architecture Working Group and leads OTA’s 2.0 initiative which makes XML easier to design and implement.
The OTA 2.0 approach takes the best of XML and extends it to make the messages more flexible while making the services that process the messages easier and faster to develop. He and his colleagues even developed tools to make it even easier and donated them to OpenTravel under an Open Source license.
OTA has been doing critically important work on airline merchandising technology standards to help airlines market and sell their ancillary products and services efficiently. Hollander has been an active member of the team working on these standards as well.
“It’s really good to see that OTA’s 2.0 effort is gaining momentum,” he said. “It will provide so many benefits to everyone involved in buying or selling travel. I think it advances the vision Tom Grubbs had of a travel industry with no barriers.”