Daniel Henry, vice president Customer Technology and Enterprise Architecture at American Airlines, has revealed why the company selected business technology major IBM for its Cloud partnership to boost efficiency.
American Airlines will utilize IBM Cloud as the foundation for a cloud transformation to ensure an efficient, faster, easier and adaptable internal process to handle site traffic during high volume periods.
“In selecting the cloud partner for American Airlines, 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 Henry, vice president Customer Technology and Enterprise Architecture at American Airlines.
“We also wanted a partner that would offer us the agility to innovate at the organizational 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,” Daniel Henry said.
American Airlines, building on the 2016 cloud partnership with IBM, will migrate to the IBM Cloud a portion of its critical applications, including aa.com, its customer-facing mobile app and its global network of check-in kiosks. American Airlines will also move other workloads and tools, such as the company’s cargo customer website to the IBM Cloud.
American Airlines and IBM will work to move critical applications to the IBM Cloud. In parallel, the two companies have teamed to rewrite these applications to the IBM Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS), and establish a cloud-native architecture.
As part of this process, American Airlines will work with IBM Global Services to leverage IBM’s Garage Methodology of creating innovative applications quickly through a micro-services architecture, design thinking, agile methodology, DevOps, and lean development.
IBM Cloud will help enable developers to build and change application functionalities for the airline’s customers. These customer-facing systems will be on the IBM Public Cloud, while American maintains backend connectivity to other on-premise legacy and third-party systems, for true Hybrid Cloud functionality.
“American Airlines is embracing IBM Cloud as a true business enabler to lead the way in innovative customer experiences,” said David Kenny, senior vice president, IBM Watson and Cloud Platform.
