American Airlines embarks on Global Cloud Transformation with IBM

IBM has announced that American Airlines will use IBM Cloud as the foundation for a massive cloud transformation designed to make internal processes more efficient, faster, easier and adaptable to better handle site traffic during high volume periods.

Building on the strategic cloud partnership signed with IBM in 2016, American Airlines 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. In addition, other workloads and tools, such as the company’s Cargo customer website, will also be moved to the IBM Cloud.

“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.”

As part of the solution, American and IBM will work together 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 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 quickly 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. “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 transform business processes and customer experiences at the same time.”