Predicting disruption: What Amadeus' move to Azure could mean for travellers

The travel software giant is vacating its data centres to make the most of AI and Microsoft's business footprint

Travel software giant Amadeus operates what was once one of the world's largest private clouds, handling data from one third of all trips made worldwide, in its prime processing more transactions per second than Google.

However, as public cloud services have matured, Amadeus has been steadily migrating hundreds of applications out of its private data centres and onto those public platforms, and in February it announced that it was going to move a large chunk of its operations to Microsoft Azure, as well as building a new partnership with Microsoft to develop novel products and services.

The goals of the move include increased agility and faster speed to market, and the ability to use Microsoft's AI algorithms in the cloud, said Fredrik Odéen, programme director corporate strategy at Amadeus.

"It's a big transformation of the way that we do things within Amadeus," he said.

"Before when we were trying to run an experiment or an innovation programme we had to order hardware and install it in our data centres when we needed to scale it up. Now we can test much riskier experiments, because we have that flexibility to quickly ramp up and quickly ramped down."

As well as breaking down internal departmental silos, it will also allow Microsoft and Amadeus, a company founded in the 1980s by a consortium of European airlines, to provide services to each others' customers.

As an example, an average business trip currently requires 10 hours of administration activities, according to Odéen. Integrating Amadeus' services into Microsoft's business applications could cut out a great many manual tasks.

"If you can connect systems better, especially with Microsoft's portfolio of software in the modern workplace such as Dynamics, there are a lot of opportunities to make that a simpler, more frictionless experience for travellers."

Turning to AI, among the anticipated benefits of using Microsoft's machine learning models is being able to predict and react quickly to disruptive events, such as extreme weather. By training the models on datasets from weather forecasters and combining that with flight schedules and other data, the impact of a weather event on a particular airport should be predictable a day or two in advance, with projections about how disruptions are likely to play out at other airports downstream from the event also made available to planners.

"Instead of being a fireman and putting out a fire, you can take the role of a fire inspector, trying 48 hours before to accommodate passengers or maybe have aeroplanes change their schedules to avoid that disruption," said Odéen. "There's a huge value in that."

Another product of the partnership is what Amadeus calls its 'data mesh', a managed data sharing platform. Unlike a data lake, where all data is chucked into the same repository, data from airlines, travel agencies, hotels, car rentals, cruise ships and more remains in its silos as 'nodes' on the mesh, with access control mechanisms put in place to govern its sharing and usage. Different lines of business can access each other's data with compliance, transparency and security requirements taken care of by Azure.

One of the aims of the system is to be able to join up these various internal and external services. So if a traveller gives permission for their details to be shared by airlines, taxi services, hotels and entertainment venues, for example, a seamless personal travel package can be created for them with everything centralised in one place.

This in turn feeds into Amadeus's plans for a 'traveller-centric platform' (TCP), in which individual third-party travel service providers can access a travellers' data in a suitable format via APIs, with the required governance and permissions taken care of.

Asked whether the firm's ubiquity as a travel data platform in partnership with one of the biggest cloud providers could lead to accusations of monopoly, Odéen said the company is very careful about such moves, and that it also works with other cloud providers in different areas. Besides, the aim is increased openness and access, he added.

"It's about making sure that anybody can access the data from anywhere. The range of innovation that partners can do on our platform and our ecosystem makes it a much more open approach, it's much easier for partners to use our solutions to build new things."