Technology is massively disrupting the travel industry by connecting consumers and providers more and more directly. Companies like Airbnb, Inc. get all the press, but Dietmar Fauser, VP of Architecture, Quality and Governance at Amadeus IT Group, said in an interview with theCUBE during Red Hat Summit 2015 that his company is also responding to changes in the market.

“We are a company providing IT solutions to the travel industry,” Fauser said. “Traditionally, Amadeus is what we call a distribution system, so we link what we call providers and subscribers, so travel agencies, online travel agencies, TMCs (Travel Management Companies) … with the providers that are essentially airlines, hotel chains, car rental companies, cruise lines, whoever has a product to sell. So it’s really a kind of an electronic marketplace that matches the demand and the offering in the industry.”

Simplification and automation of operational environment

Amadeus has been around for decades and used to provide connection terminals before the Internet became mainstream.

“So the principle objective is simplification and automation of our operational environment,” Fauser  said.

Its main focus is reducing the number of decisions that human operators have to make about workload balancing and other IT tasks using containers and open-source operating systems.

Fauser also addressed the question of whether open-source and Cloud can ever match the reliability of full-stack architecture.

“The biggest Cloud environments are built on open technology, so Google Compute Engine, AWS, there is a lot of open-source technology in there,” he explained. “Secondly, there are indications that in the future, some of our giants might ask us to run the solutions not in our data center, but closer to a given booking source, for example. Like a lot of other companies, there might be a need to distribute the computing and not to master the infrastructure over which you run it ultimately … and it’s really important to decouple the applications from the underlying infrastructure.”

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Red Hat Summit 2015.

Image source: SiliconANGLE