American Airlines Moves to IBM Cloud Storage
Jennifer Billock November 30, 2016
American Airlines is preparing to move some of its legacy applications into the IBM cloud.
American Airlines has recently made the decision to move some of its legacy applications used to manage tasks to the IBM public cloud. The airline then will use IBM’s proprietary set of BlueMix tools to manage those applications.
“The agreement runs the gamut from software and services to infrastructure and also will include data analytics and Watson going forward,” Patrick Grubbs, IBM’s vice president of travel and transportation, told Fortune.
Watson is artificial intelligence software owned by IBM that can be customized for various industries.
American Airlines has noted that IBM will not have exclusive control as a sole cloud partner—the company plans to use various providers as it sees fit.
“We use the best and newest tools for the right applications,” an American Airlines spokesperson told Fortune.
The move to IBM’s cloud has been a while in the making; back in September, American announced that it was evaluating three companies to determine cloud feasibility: Amazon Web Services, IBM, and Microsoft.
More and more large companies are seeing the need to move legacy applications to cloud systems, Fortune says, as the upkeep and operation of individual data centers becomes more strenuous.
As for American and IBM, the two companies have a long history of working together. They joined forces to create SABRE, a program that pioneered online reservation taking.
Details about the current deal for cloud storage, including what exactly will be stored and how much the agreement is costing American, were not disclosed.
[Photo: Singkham/Shutterstock]
