American Airlines to move consumer-facing apps to IBM Cloud, says Cloud Foundry key
American Airlines said it will migrate its website, mobile app for customers, and airport kiosks to IBM Cloud in a multi-year deal.
IBM inked a cloud partnership with American Airlines in 2016 and now plans to move more workloads over time.
Daniel Henry, vice president of customer technology and enterprise architecture, said IBM was a good cloud partner because it is open-source friendly and builds on Cloud Foundry.
"Cloud Foundry was one of our core principles. We're going to be a multi-cloud consumer and IBM is committed to Cloud Foundry," said Henry.
Read more: Outages and delays highlight how airline industry needs new IT approaches
American Airlines and its rivals are trying to transform their businesses, become more digital and customer friendly and eliminate outages that have caused multiple delays. In addition, IBM Cloud has been winning deals in the transportation industry as Boeing, Emirates, Etihad Airways, Bombardier, and Pratt & Whitney are customers.
The airline will still have third party and applications on its own data centers, but will be moving software to the cloud. And as new applications are discussed the approach will be cloud first, said Henry.
For IBM Cloud, the American Airlines deal is a key win. Gartner's recent Magic Quadrant dinged IBM Cloud in a few areas and noted the company is retooling its data centers.
According to American Airlines and IBM, the two companies will work together to move critical applications to the cloud. These applications will also need a rewrite to IBM's platform-as-a-service effort and become cloud-native.