American Airlines will start shifting many of its customer facing services to the cloud from next month.
The airline’s existing partnership with IBM will be expanded to migrate its website, consumer mobile app and airport kiosks to IBM Cloud.
It is a move to be more efficient, customer focused and adapt better to periods of high volume data traffic.
It will also hope to avoid any more damaging outages causing widespread flight disruptions like those which have dogged the industry over the last few months.
"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 Henry, American’s vice president customer technology and enterprise architecture.
"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."
Other functions such as AA’s cargo customer website will also be moved to the IBM Cloud in the future.
The core customer facing services will have Hybrid Cloud functionality maintaining backend connectivity to other on-premise legacy and third-party systems, American said.
"American Airlines is embracing IBM Cloud as a true business enabler to lead the way in innovative customer experiences. 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," said David Kenny, SVP of IBM Watson and cloud platform.
