Amadeus: Shaping the Future of Travel with Apigee
Olivier Richaud
VP Platforms and SRE, Symphony
Xavier Gardien, Amadeus
If you’ve taken a trip in the past 30 years, then you’ve probably used Amadeus technology. Our solutions connect over 1.5 billion travellers every year to the journeys they want, linking them via travel agents, search engines, and tour operators to over 700 airlines, 110 airports, 580,000 hotel properties, 40 car rental companies, 90 railways, and more.
In 2016, over 595 million total travel agency bookings were processed using the Amadeus distribution platform. In addition, over 175 Amadeus airline customers processed over 1.3 billion passengers using Amadeus’ Passenger Service Systems. We combine an understanding of how people travel with the development of the most complex, trusted, critical systems our customers need.
A platform for scalability and speed
In today’s crowded travel marketplace, our customers want IT solutions that can scale up to match their complex needs—whether this includes solving the challenge of ever increasing flight search volumes, delivering flight search results in milliseconds, or enabling “pop-up” check-in and bag drop from anywhere.Amadeus operates at large scale with hundreds of thousands of transactions processed per second to deliver mission-critical services in travel. Having a scalable and secure platform is essential to continue driving solutions for our customers, and Apigee’s API management platform fulfills this objective.
At the same time, our customers also want solutions that can adapt quickly with new features and upgrades. We’re talking days, not weeks or months. Apigee provides on-premise gateways to securely expose our APIs to our customers. These can be scaled to deliver our APIs according to our business needs. Apigee’s great capacity to create rock-solid API infrastructure gives us more freedom to focus on the architectural details of the technology we create for the travel industry.
A platform for collaboration
In the fast-paced and competitive travel industry, our customers hunger for new ways of doing things. This hunger can only be met with an open and collaborative approach across the sector.That’s why we use an open systems architecture that offers SOAP/XML and REST/JSON formatting to be entirely platform neutral. It is totally independent of language and application frameworks, making implementation fast and efficient.
But as the number of customers using our APIs grows, so does the need to shorten the time to deploy our applications to market and evolve our API strategy.
The Apigee platform is key here. For one thing, it’s always up to date with constantly evolving industry standards, in particular with security standards like OAuth.
The platform also forms the backbone for the web app development cycle for Amadeus and our customers to jointly build applications and release them in production. Ultimately, by integrating Apigee’s control plane seamlessly with our APIs, we are able to foster fully automated operations.
A platform for visibility
Understanding how our APIs are consumed is also key for us and our customers. With Apigee we are able to see this and provide them with a detailed view of API analytics. In this big data era, knowing the number of transactions, response times on APIs, or the page travellers are spending the most time on with a mobile app could be invaluable to make the informed decisions that help us maintain an edge over competitors. This also serves as a great feedback tool to closely monitor where the industry is heading.As a leader in travel technology, we're committed to open systems. That’s why Amadeus also works with Kubernetes. We have a strong partnership with Red Hat through its OpenShift platform, which is based on Kubernetes. Amadeus Cloud Services works with this open-source system and enables us to use automated cloud methods to deploy our services in a flexible mix of private and public clouds.
We're excited to collaborate with players like Google and Apigee, because together we can pave the way for technology that makes better journeys and creates value for our customers, travellers, and society.
Olivier Richaud is senior manager, API management & web services, technology platforms & engineering, at Amadeus. Xavier Gardien is head of portfolio and product management, technology platforms & engineering, at Amadeus.
