The challenge of outsourcing

Few airlines can afford to build and implement new generation systems, but outsourcing critical business systems is always risky.

What are the risks likely to be if you outsource to the wrong partner?

• Delay or failure in solution delivery
• Delay or failure in project delivery
• No real business transformation, leading to a poor ROI
• No real technology renewal, leading to yet another migration soon
• Tedious management of multiple providers
• Termination of services if the platform does not attract a critical mass of airlines

Amadeus will help you to minimise – if not eliminate – these risks of outsourcing by bringing its unique resources and expertise together to manage your technology enabled transformation.

Choosing the right outsourcing partner is a tough decision. You need to ask yourself:

• Are we confident about getting the solution on time?
• Will we get the skills and experience to manage a risk-free migration?
• Will we at least secure our current service availability and back-up capabilities?
• Are we sure that the solution we will migrate to is not a dead end, and that it will be maintained and upgraded for decades to come?

No risk on solution delivery

Amadeus is in a unique position to almost eliminate the risk on solution delivery. We are able to do this not only because Altéa is the only new generation solution in production, but also because we offer a pool of 2,500 IT experts to upgrade and maintain this platform.

It took €300 million of investment and 7 years of effort to build this new generation common platform with the help of blue chip airlines as our launch partners.

New vendors tend to underestimate the financial resources, expertise and time required to build such a long-lasting new generation solution - one that is flexible enough to meet the needs of several airlines and therefore attract the critical customer base that is essential for it to remain viable.

Peace of mind migration

Migrating an airline’s critical systems is always a risky project – one that is often described as being akin to open heart surgery.

A smooth cutover minimises business disruption. But this demands a team of experienced professionals as well as all the appropriate tools and methodologies. There is a significant learning curve, which entails thorough testing at the beginning.

Amadeus leverages its unique track record of successful migrations with airlines of all sizes and in all environments to provide the lowest level of risk on each new migration project. What’s more, Amadeus is now industrialising the migration process to offer the fastest possible migration path for every airline.

Peace of mind IT operating service

Airlines outsource their critical business systems to Amadeus in full confidence – and they generally even experience an increase in service performance.

They benefit from the capabilities of the state-of-the-art Amadeus Data Centre and its secured network, which was built to meet the current and future needs of the world’s leading Global Distribution System. This guarantees unlimited scalability, world-class service levels and outstanding IT support for any airline joining the Amadeus common platform.

Providers that do not have similar business volumes on a single platform cannot afford to deliver such reliability and service quality over the long term – and service availability is certainly a risk airlines should carefully evaluate.

100% back-up services

With its second site data centre, Amadeus can provide a 100% guarantee of business continuation, which eliminates any potential service disruption.

We have been able to develop this second site back-up facility of the main Amadeus Data Centre because of our business volume and common platform concept.

A high-quality service like this cannot be offered at such a competitive price by providers who do not reach a similar business volume.

No risk on platform lifecycle

Selecting a solution that will last and meet your needs for decades to come is critical if you do not want to pay the cost of change several times over.

The Amadeus Altéa platform is definitely your safest choice in the long run, matching all the important criteria for a long lifecycle:

• already available (with the necessary investment already made)
• already used by a critical mass of airlines and chosen by the major players within every global alliance
• already using latest technology and built around latest business concepts.
• easy to upgrade and easy to adapt thanks to a modular approach and open standards
• benefits from continuous upgrade with a unique community model

All of these factors minimise the risk of having to migrate to another platform in a couple of years’ time due to a lack of evolution, the need to replace technology, the need to integrate an alliance or simply due to service termination.