Microsoft and Amadeus announce partnership to develop 'hyper-personalised' services for travellers

Move will see Amadeus move from private cloud into Azure

Amadeus, the Madrid-headquartered travel software giant originally set up by a consortium of European airlines in the 1980s and operator of one of Europe's's largest private clouds, is moving a large chunk of its infrastructure to the Microsoft Azure public cloud and partnering with Microsoft to develop new products and services.

In a blog post, Microsoft outlines three key areas the companies will be focusing on.

The first is the creation of new "hyper-personalised" services for travellers through industry-wide collaboration; second, the two firms aim to develop products together and co-ordinate marketing strategies and delivery; and the partnership will also see Amadeus' technical platform moved to Azure, with Microsoft becoming the travel IT firm's preferred cloud provider.

The planned hyper-personalised services are expected to see airlines, hotels, hire car and taxi firms and health services collaborating on the platform, allowing for a more integrated experience, initially for business travellers.

Commenting on the move, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said: "Advances in digital technology are rapidly redefining every aspect of work and life, including how we travel. Together with Amadeus, we will apply the power of Azure and its AI capabilities to create new frictionless experiences for travellers worldwide and reimagine the travel industry going forward.

Luis Maroto, president and CEO of Amadeus, added: "Amadeus' strength is built on our people and our history of pushing the boundaries of travel technology, providing our customers with better and ever more innovative ways to achieve their goals. From our long experience with cloud technology, we are convinced it is the right systems architecture to deliver on this continued commitment, and that Microsoft is the right partner to help us achieve our goals together. This includes the opportunity to explore, design and develop new solutions that take full advantage of cloud technology."

Amadeus has long been a major adopter of and contributor to open source technologies, choosing solutions that it can integrate easily and providing an open API that others can plug their services into. A large part of its infrastructure is based on Red Hat OpenShift but, moving to the public cloud has always been part of Amadeus' strategy, said SVP cloud transformation programme Denis Lacroix, adding that the maturity of cloud services has now made the move possible and will increase the resiliency and security of the company's services as well as enabling it to offer new products.

"Public cloud technology has evolved in such a way that it can now deliver an improved level of service than was previously possible through our private infrastructure," he said.