Sqills’ inventory, reservation and ticketing SaaS platform S3 Passenger is the first IT platform with a working open sales and distribution model (OSDM) online implementation based on the recently completed specification designed by UIC railway carriers and ticket distributors.
After joining the initiative in late 2020, Sqills contributed to the technical standard to promote interoperability. This effort has resulted in the first working OSDM implementation that will become available to S3 Passenger clients in upcoming releases.
Chair and vice-chair respectively of OSDM Marc Guigon and Vittorio Carta say:
“For OSDM, 2020 was the year of specifying the standard and we are now proving that 2021 can be the year of its implementation. We are excited and proud of the example Sqills has set for contributing carriers for how quick and relatively easy the OSDM-online standard can be implemented. We look forward to seeing other partners follow soon. It proves that for a capable back-end system, the OSDM-online interface covers all relevant principles. The ticket distributors in the OSDM workgroup now prepare to integrate the APIs based on this first implementation. A big step forward in the ‘European Year of ‘Rail’’ and public transport in general as OSDM is multi-modal by design.
Sqills co-founder & S3 product owner Johan Nieuwerth said:
“Supporting cross-operator cooperation to improve passenger comfort and compete with car and air travel is a key priority for the public transport industry. We have embraced OSDM as a contributing factor to this goal, not only because the standard reflects the S3 Passenger capabilities and essentially unifies the distributor-to-carrier dialogue, but it also aligns with S3’s native multi-inventory features. Now that inventory managed in S3 Passenger can be distributed via OSDM, the next step is making other carriers using OSDM available within S3 Passenger. This is an interesting option for operators using S3 Passenger who want to connect with other inventories bilaterally. Sqills will make a so-called ‘sandbox environment’ available to the OSDM workgroup. This sandbox will be powered by S3 Passenger. We believe this first step will help increase the speed of adoption of the OSDM standard.”