UPDATED 23:54 EDT / NOVEMBER 29 2016

CLOUD

American Airlines lands on IBM’s cloud

American Airlines Group Inc. is teaming up with IBM Cloud in a deal that will see the airline move some enterprise applications to Big Blue’s cloud computing platform.

The two companies have a relationship that stretches back more than 50 years,to IBM’s development of American Airlines’ original, centralized electronic reservation and ticketing system, which went live back in the 1950s. More recently, IBM helped American Airlines and US Airways to integrate their information technology systems following the two airlines’ merger, which was completed last year.

Tuesday’s agreement becomes IBM Cloud’s largest publicly announced deal, and comes as a massive boost for IBM as it strives to gain share in a public cloud market dominated by Amazon Web Services, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft Azure. A recent report by Synergy Research Group on the Infrastructure as a Service, Platform as a Service and hosted private cloud markets shows AWS has a 31 percent market share, followed by Microsoft Azure with 11 percent, Google Cloud with 8 percent and IBM Cloud with just 5 percent.

The deal will see American Airlines leverage the IBM Cloud for both enterprise applications and a wide range of application development capabilities available through IBM Bluemix. Additionally, the deal also means American Airlines gains access to IBM’s analytics capabilities as it pursues the development of a “cognitive infrastructure,” IBM said.

“This partnership is about delivering the flexibility to American Airline’s business, allowing them to enhance their customer relationships and further gain a competitive advantage,” Robert LeBlanc, senior vice president of IBM Cloud, said in a statement.

Image credit: Skeeze via pixabay.com

A message from John Furrier, co-founder of SiliconANGLE:

Your vote of support is important to us and it helps us keep the content FREE.

One click below supports our mission to provide free, deep, and relevant content.  

Join our community on YouTube

Join the community that includes more than 15,000 #CubeAlumni experts, including Amazon.com CEO Andy Jassy, Dell Technologies founder and CEO Michael Dell, Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger, and many more luminaries and experts.

“TheCUBE is an important partner to the industry. You guys really are a part of our events and we really appreciate you coming and I know people appreciate the content you create as well” – Andy Jassy

THANK YOU