Case Study: Sabre — A Culture Of Engagement

Sabre Holdings is an early adopter of Agile processes and open source technologies. The company was originally motivated to use open source as a tactic to avoid software capital costs, but along the way management discovered that strategic use of open source led to a higher-performance culture as well. At the start, Sabre found it needed to improve its development and architecture skill set to exploit open source projects such as Apache ServiceMix, Apache Tomcat, and Linux. While this transition was not without challenges, it brought a higher proportion of intrinsically motivated, creative developers to Sabre. Over time, use of open source software led to increased developer engagement, a greater sense of ownership of the code, and the evolution to an open contributor culture. Developers also delivered transactional, mission-critical systems that perform well on scale-out hardware while saving millions.