Amadeus deal to boost web-based services

Amadeus has signed a new global partnership agreement with cloud computing firm Akamai aimed at improving the performance of its web-based services and applications.

Under the terms of the agreement, Amadeus customers will be able to use the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which optimises internet capabilities in order to deliver content and applications more quickly and securely.

The partnership between Amadeus and Akamai was trialled by Amadeus customers from 28 countries. As part of the pilot for airline e-Commerce customers, Amadeus said that one large network carrier’s homepage response time performed 3.7 times faster than before. At the same time, the response time for accessing Amadeus’ Flex Pricer calendar via the Amadeus e-Retail engine was 3.1 times quicker than previous speeds.

Denis Lacroix, Amadeus’ vice president of product development for sales and e-Commerce platforms, commented; “Improved responsiveness across all of our web-based applications and services at Amadeus essentially means increased revenues for our customers. By combining the globally distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform with our own leading technology platforms, applications and solutions, customers can ensure the data their own customers are accessing is located closer to them, which drastically improves response times and the overall user experience.

“Amadeus of course wants to ensure only the very best global performance for all users accessing our applications, regardless of location. Our tests prove that overall response speeds can be improved by two to three times, and in some cases up to nearly five times previous speeds. We very much look forward to offering this service to our existing customers across the Amadeus portfolio,” he added.

“For global companies such as Amadeus, the cloud is fast becoming the application delivery channel of choice for both business to consumer and business to business services,” explained Willie M. Tejada, senior vice president and general manager of Akamai’s Enterprise Cloud Division. “Our solutions are designed to provide an exemplary end user experience independent of device or location. This is critical to overall service adoption and ultimate customer satisfaction.”

The Akamai Intelligent Platform delivers as much as 30% of global Web traffic on any given day.