I’ve spent eleven years watching people renovate the same house.
The house is an airport. Underneath the nice terminal you walk through there are dozens of systems, installed by different people, in different decades, to different standards. None of them spoke to each other and most of them have since left. The air-traffic feed. The baggage system. The operational database. The billing. The gate planning. The thing that talks to the airline. The thing nobody remembers the name of that will absolutely take the whole airport down if you unplug it.
Getting all of that to work together, reliably and in real time, without setting anything on fire, is data integration. And it works exactly like renovating a house. There are three ways to do it, and only one of them lasts.
Option one: you do it yourself.
This is very popular. Every airport has at some point decided that integration is basically plumbing, and how hard can plumbing be. So somebody clever in the IT department writes a script. The script connects two systems. It works. Everyone is delighted.
Then they connect a third system. Then a fourth. Then the airline changes a data format on a Tuesday, the whole thing quietly stops updating the departure boards, and nobody notices until a very calm man at gate 14 starts asking questions.
DIY integration is the home-improvement equivalent of watching one YouTube video and then removing a wall. It feels great right up until you discover the wall was load-bearing, and in an airport every wall is load-bearing. The clever person who wrote the script eventually leaves for a better job, taking the only copy of how it works with them, and now you own a house where the light switch in the kitchen turns on a tap in the basement and no living person knows why.
Option two: you hire someone to do it for you.
This is the grown-up answer, and it’s a real step up. You bring in a firm. They’re professional, they’ve done renovations before, they put in a proper kitchen. It lasts a bit longer.
The catch is the one every homeowner learns eventually: the firm’s business model is not your house. It’s the next invoice. Every change is a change order. Every new room needs a workshop, a scoping phase, and three men in high-visibility jackets standing around a problem you thought you’d already paid for. The renovation is never quite finished, because a finished renovation is a customer who stops paying. You wanted a house you could live in. What you got was a permanent relationship with a contractor who has a key.
It works, and it’s better than the YouTube wall. But you don’t own your home anymore. You’re renting it back from the people who wired it, and they wired it so that only they can read the wiring.
Lately the firms have noticed that homeowners are catching on, so a new species has appeared: the contractor dressed as a kitchen company. There’s a brochure now, and a product name, and a version number. What shows up at your door is the same crew on the same day rates, except the day rates are called licence fees and the scaffolding is called a platform. The test is simple. A product is something that was built once and sells many times. If every installation takes two years and a small village of consultants, you didn’t buy a product. You bought a renovation with a logo on it.
Option three: the part almost nobody gets right.
Eleven years of watching this teaches you something no product sprint will. The people who renovate a house so it’s still standing in a hundred years are not the ones with the flashiest kitchen. They’re the boring ones who got the foundation, the wiring and the plumbing right first, once, properly, so that every room built afterwards just plugs into something that already works.
The odd thing about these people is that they don’t start with the rooms. Everyone else starts with the rooms, because rooms are what you can photograph. The experts start underneath, with the part you never see, and they treat it as the one decision the whole house depends on. Get that layer right and you can add a room, replace a room, knock two rooms together, or let a completely new tenant move in without disturbing the rest of the house. Get it wrong and every future job is a demolition.
That’s what integration actually is when it’s done by people who intend to still be standing there in a decade. Not a cleverer script, and not a bigger contractor, but a single well-built layer underneath everything, which every other system simply sits on top of. You don’t decorate your way to a hundred-year house. You wire it once, correctly, and then the decorating is easy.
Very few people know how to pick the right tools, the right products, and above all the right process so the thing lasts. It isn’t a shopping trip. Anyone can buy tools. Knowing which tools, in which order, according to which rules, so that the house is still safe to live in after twenty years of tenants who each thought their change was the important one: that’s the whole job. And it isn’t for sale in a box.
Which brings me to last week.
We finally said publicly what we’ve been doing quietly for eleven years. AirportLabs now integrates the operational data layer for more than 100 airports on four continents. Across that network we move more than one million data events every second on average, and ten million per second at the busiest single hubs. A single major airport now generates more operational data in a day than the entire internet did in the year 2000. We move it, check every piece of it against the rules of how aviation actually works, and deliver it, correct and on time, to every system and every person who needs it before the next second’s worth arrives.
We did that without ever raising outside money, without ever buying a competitor, and without a single YouTube video. We did it the boring way: foundation first, for a very long time, in production, where it’s not allowed to fall over.
I’m not going to pretend this is glamorous. Nobody has ever walked through an airport and admired the integration layer, the same way nobody admires the wiring behind the wall. Good. The wiring you notice is the wiring that’s on fire.
The reason to care is the same reason you eventually stop trying to renovate the house yourself. Everyone can knock down a wall. Everyone can hire someone to knock down a wall and keep paying them to stand next to it. Very few people can build the thing underneath so well that you never have to think about it again.
We’ve spent eleven years being those people. Most travellers have never heard of us but the biggest airports rely on us because we turned out to be the version that’s still standing.