Amadeus, a global provider of the technology which keeps the travel sector moving, has deployed an enterprise private cloud, based on VMware Integrated OpenStack, to support digital transformation initiatives.
The company's solutions aim to improve the business performance of travel agencies, corporations, airlines, airports, hotels, railways and more. Its technologies cover the full travel process, from the initial search to making a booking, from pricing to ticketing, from managing reservations to managing check-in and departure processes, and its systems process almost 4 billion transactions daily.
VMware Integrated OpenStack offers Amadeus the fastest path to supporting VMware vSphere workloads in an API-driven OpenStack cloud. With Amadeus Cloud Services, the travel giant says it is able to be more innovative and to really have the end-to-end responsibility for what it is doing, says Udo Sebald who is responsible for service and portfolio management at Amadeus IT Group.
He says VMware gives Amadeus the ability to provide a system which scales and is agile enough for the changing needs of customers, and its technology allows Amadeus to drive forward automation. "We are looking to automate repetitive tasks, which lowers the risk of things going wrong when done manually, eliminating human error. Stability is also important, and products like VMware Integrated OpenStack and NSX help us to achieve the level of stability our customers expect."
According to Sebald, cloud technology, standardised in terms of tool chain and processes, allows automation activities to be implemented to increase availability and stability and drives down cost, which allows Amadeus to invest further in innovation. "Innovation is a priority for Amadeus, and a significant amount of investment is channeled into R&D."
He says Amadeus chose VMware as it has been working with the virtualisation giant for 15 years. "Firstly, we used VMware for the virtualisation of our infrastructure, which allowed us to change processes and run more smoothly."
The company's infrastructure as a service (IAAS) platform is also powered by VMware Integrated OpenStack, VMware NSX, VMware vSAN and VMware vSphere. Amadeus is supporter of and contributor to open sources projects, and thus selected OpenStack because it wanted a platform conducive to agile development. "Following a broad review of OpenStack distributions, Amadeus selected VMware's OpenStack distribution because of its ease of deployment and integration with VMware vSphere and NSX."
"We think OpenStack is a standard we can build upon to be industry standards based. We would like to use environments that allow us to use technology not only in our data centre, but potentially for public providers and customers too. We see a lot of use cases coming up, where customers will benefit from the compute happening closer to their location. By doing this, we can minimise response times in the system. Cloud removes any delay, by using the same application, but running it in the vicinity of the customer, which improves the user experience."
All of the apps Amadeus is building are part of a community platform aimed at the worldwide market, there are specific requirements, then we bring those customer specific requirements into the platform. There is a continuous process of developing new functionality and apps as customers come on board, then making them available globally."
"Everyone is talking about digital transformation. One perspective is our customers want to see the entire travel process supported seamlessly by the system. We still have a way to go and I think we still have a lot of room to get better, and to bridge the 'media gaps'. We are working on the end-to-end flow. We have solutions for airlines, airports, hotels, and similar, and we have done lot of work with individual stakeholders. There is still much room for innovation in the sector though."
In terms of internal processes, automation, and better stability is key. "We are looking to cloud to support better incident management and change management. To recognise patterns from monitoring data, and eliminate problems before they occur. Amadeus is focused on improving the experience for users and partners, and cloud is an excellent technology to support those challenges. In terms of VMware, we try to build long-term relationships so today's investments can be leveraged tomorrow."
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