American Airlines is moving critical applications, including its customer-facing mobile app and check-in kiosks, to IBM’s cloud, the latter has announced.
The move builds upon the two companies’ partnership, first announced last year, with the airline also moving workloads and tools such as its Cargo customer website to the IBM cloud.
The two companies have agreed to rewrite applications to IBM’s cloud platform as a service (PaaS), as well as establishing a cloud-native architecture. American Airlines will work with IBM Global Services to help create applications through a micro-services architecture, DevOps, agile methodology, and lean development.
“In selecting the right cloud partner for American, we wanted to ensure the provider would be a champion of Cloud Foundry and open source technologies so we don’t get locked down by proprietary solutions,” said Daniel Hendry, VP customer technology and enterprise architecture at American. “We also wanted a partner that would offer us the agility to innovate at the organisational and process levels and have deep industry expertise with security at its core.
“We feel confident that IBM is the right long-term partner to not only provide the public cloud platform, but also enable our delivery transformation,” Henry added.
IBM has helped several companies – in particular airlines – with their digital transformations of late. Earlier this month it was revealed that Singapore Airlines was using various apps to help increase productivity and customer experience, while United Airlines and Finnair are also using IBM to provide iOS apps to devices and employees.
“American Airlines is embracing IBM Cloud as a true business enabler to lead the way in innovative customer experiences,” said David Kenny, SVP IBM Watson and Cloud Platform. “It is the foundation of American’s digital transformation and enables the airline to take its delivery speed to the next level with increased scalability, performance and agility to improve business processes and customer experiences at the same time.”