American Airlines has selected IBM Cloud to be a service provider as it moves its internal applications to the public cloud.
They said that it was looking to move some of its customer web site and back office applications to the public cloud. American Airlines was evaluating Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Microsoft.
IBM said that American will use its infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service tools.
Patrick Grubbs, Vice president of travel and transportation at IBM said that they will be partnering with American Airlines and will be kicking off at the enterprise level, some will be customer facing system and others will be at the back office.
American Airlines had told an interview about its cloud bake off in September and noted that a deal will be announced soon.
For IBM, the American Airlines win comes amid AWS' re:Invent conference in Las Vegas. Grubbs added that part of the IBM deal with American revolves around agile development. American may include other cloud providers, but Grubbs noted that the airline wasn't looking to break its infrastructure into chunks.
According to the American Airlines, the cloud move is part of a much broader systems integration effort following the mergers in United States Airways.
On its annual report, American Airlines noted this:
While we have to date successfully integrated several of our systems, including our customer reservations system and our pilot and fleet scheduling system, we still have to complete several additional important system integration projects. The integration of these systems in a number of prior airline mergers has taken longer, been more disruptive and cost more than originally forecast.
The implementation process to integrate these various systems will involve a number of risks that could adversely impact our business, results of operations and financial condition. New systems will replace multiple legacy systems and the related implementation will be a complex and time-consuming project involving substantial expenditures for implementation consultants, system hardware, software and implementation activities, as well as the transformation of business and financial processes.
American Airline is the world's largest airline when measured by fleet size, revenue and scheduled passengers-kilometer flown and the second largest by number of destination served.
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