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Comment by jey | Hacker News Reader

Is it just me or does that sound cheap? Though I'm sure Google has a far better idea of ITA's revenues than we do. CrunchBase says they had a $100MM Series A round in 2006, but they've been around since 1996.

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I'm thinking that's going down as a 'returned 2x capital' sort of purchase on the VC score sheets, unless they took most of the company in the Series A. It's impressive that they ran for nearly 5 years on a Series A, if they did.

I also think the value for Google here isn't revenues so much as controlling another piece of the internet transactional infrastructure.

They have substantial revenue, so not taking much investment isn't surprising. I just wonder what the thought process was in deciding to sell to Google at this price.

This must still be a huge win for the founders. They probably still had most of the equity since they only took one round of financing, and at a point when the company was already mature.

Returning 2x might also be a good thing for the VCs too. I assume, getting some liquidity back is probably important to them in the current climate.

The most recent investors, who probably invested at least in part based on the promise of RES are no doubt happy to get out with something like this.

The price does seem relatively low. ITA's revenues are probably not very significant for Google, so they may be buying purely for the team and technology. And for a team and technology acquisition $700M is pretty huge.

ITA has a big problem: their follow on to the QPX product that everyone has been talking about is a airline reservation, management etc. system called RES. This is desperately needed since pretty much everyone is running these systems on expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases.

Dan Wienreb did a very interesting talk, "Lisp for High-Performance Transaction Processing" that covered it and a bit on the future of Lisp (for a outline and link to the talk see: http://xach.livejournal.com/225634.html).

RES is a three tier system with Oracle RAC as the backend (pretty much the only choice), stateless Common Lisp middleware and Java with the usual web libraries for the front end. 300 milisecond? general max transaction time, which they weren't finding to be a big issue even with GC.

The problem: someone has to go first. While it's arbitrarily sized/scoped to accommodate American Airlines, Air Canada was going to be the lead customer. In August 2009 they suspended their participation in the project, I strongly suspect due to the general recession/depression in the industry. Switching would be very expensive in all sorts of ways and raw survival almost certainly is taking priority. (ITA has continued developing the system.)

This part/project of ITA is very likely to be a victim of bad timing; I sure can't see Google credibly continuing it, it's all wrong for their service culture, although perhaps it'll get spun off.

That, and google has an aversion to common lisp... so it would need to be a rewrite.

EDIT: Mind you, I've only heard of the aversion to lisp, so have no data to back my claim up. That said, it has been mentioned several times on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1282583 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=363023

The example that is usually brought up is one guy at Google (Erann Gat) that had one conversation with his manager that ended in a "No".

That's completely different to Google buying an existing business for $700 million whose core tech is written in Lisp.

I don't think they'd have an aversion to buying a piece of legacy software written in Lisp if said software had a proven revenue stream and was part of the core underpinning to a major category of search they want to get into more.

However, it's reasonable for them to be averse to writing totally new projects in Lisp, in-house, because when you're at a huge company as a general rule you don't want dozens of different languages in use: it's inefficient and you lose out on a lot of opportunities to leverage skills across teams and across service layers if you do that. Lisp, from what I heard, didn't make the cut, despite it's strengths. They still allow a few though, and I believe they are Python, JavaScript, Java and C/C++.

"with Oracle RAC as the backend (pretty much the only choice)"

... not any more!

I don't know this space at all; what are the other options?

Think Bigtable.

That doesn't strike me as fitting the requirements. They need high transaction rates and true high availability (don't know if Bigtable is as good). And they don't need petabyte scaling, which I gather is one of Bigtable's big attractions.

You have a good point. You are kind of implying that it is good for transactions in large batches, but may not have the 300 ms response.

But the oracle RAC (just guessing here) may act as a cache between the 300 ms part and the actual tables, and to be a fat reliable pipe.

But they do take on some interesting problems, such as how do you keep this up across system upgrades, hardware failures, application version migration, among others.

Interestingly, apparently Google has the MySQL query engine running on BigTable.

That might make migrating from Oracle to BigTable a bit easier.

Downvoted? Can I ask why?

Google

Good points. You're probably right than it'll get spun off given the technologies behind it. I have to ask though, how much of this is a result of technological inertia as opposed to cultural inertia?

It's not the first project that I have seen that was cancelled. Building a PSS (RES and/or INV) is not a small thing, given that there is so much complexity in the airline industry which has to be supported. I think it would be very exciting if Google continued these developments. Some of the major players (e.g. 1A) are in a quasi-monopoly and they definitely exploit that. More competition would be good. (But I agree, I don't see why Google would want to compete.)

Btw, many of the PSS vendors already have or are currently in the process of renewing their "expensive mainframes with ugly old code bases".

Is Dan's talk accessible online somewhere? The YouTube video is marked as private (see e.g. http://www.gawkk.com/lisp-for-high-performance-transaction-p...).

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