Good morning everyone.

Transcription

1 Good morning everyone. I am Hervé Couturier, Head of Amadeus Research and Development (R&D) division and I am Wolfgang Krips, Head of Amadeus Global Operations. Luis has shared our vision for the travel industry - to enable a seamless journey experience for all travellers. Our colleagues have talked to you about the needs of our customers, both travel providers andtravelsellers,andofcourse,withinthat,byfocusingontheneeds and wants of travellers. WearenowgoingtoexplainhowAmadeustechnologyistheenabler of such a vision and why we believe we are uniquely positioned to deliver. Business drives our technology, and technology allows the industry to progress in its businesses. We have a vision, we can anticipate travel industry needs, and we invest accordingly in technology to ensure that we are able to provide 1

2 our customers with the solutions they need to succeed. 1

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4 So,whatarethefutureneedsofthetravelindustry? Our customers expect not only cutting-edge functionality and features, but also robust, versatile and fast systems, as their businesses rely more and more on our platforms. Factors such as 100% availability, sub-second response times and flexibility of deployment are becoming mission-critical business features. Both on mobile and on internet, response time is seen as a critical factor for adoption. Our customers need advanced security to develop trust with their users and partners, knowing that their personal and financial data is safe. With the predominance of mobile, omni-channel capabilities require that information and transactions are processed in both a contextual and personalised way, in particular when the user transacts from multipledevices.forexample,anairlineorhotelmaywanttomakea special offer to a traveller who has experienced a delay during their last trip or suggest destinations that are in line with the traveller s preferences. This means capturing and analysing beforehand a lot of information about the traveller and the context in which they 3

5 interacted with the system - before, during and after the trips. This mass of information, often referred to as Big Data, must be stored, mined and transformed into meaningful parameters that can later be injected into real-time transactions. This requires investment in a powerful and scalable technical framework to handle Big Data. This framework is the essential enabler for building the applications that can provide these solutions. A number of technologies grouped under the concepts of Cloud and Big Data are on the market, mostly offered by mainstream IT companies and the open-source community. They offer technical advantages, in particular for infinite scalability and continuous availability. They also open new business opportunities in their applications for Big Data management and integration to other systems via a powerful API framework. Our technological agenda incorporates these non-functional business requirements, which for us, are becoming the New Normal. _ Using cloud and automation we can deliver services more quickly, more cost effectively and with higher quality. _ Using Big Data methods based on Amadeus unique access to a large pool of traveller data, we make sure our customers propose therightproductattherightpricetoincreasesalesandunitprices. _ UsingthemostmodernAPIconceptswillspeedupthecreationof new functionality and new businesses into the Amadeus ecosystem. _ By continuously investing in security and compliance, we help our customers build the trust they require with their customers as threat levels increase. 3

6 What is the right technology to serve these multiple and complex customer needs? To understand where we are heading, we are going to use the methodology our colleagues have used previously: first, to see where we have come from, then to identify our competitive advantages and thenestablish howwecanevolveto deliverto the new environment and customer requirements. Systems architecture is traditionally based on 3 layers: _ Infrastructure, which is a combination of hardware, storage and network in a data centre. _ Platform, also called middleware, which provides base technical services, such as database management, communication, security and transactional frameworks. _ Application, which implements business functionality. Before the Cloud, computer based services were delivered from tightly integrated hardware and software, making the development and the deployment of applications complicated and time consuming. The 4

7 Cloud fundamentally changes this. In mainframes, the three layers are fully interlaced and not clearly differentiated. This means that there is very little flexibility and a full dependency on the vendor. This is what we call legacy technology, andwhatwerefertowhenwesaythatwehaveinvestedintransaction Processing Facilities(TPF) decommissioning. We have left this behind us. In service-oriented architectures (aka our Open Systems), there is a good logical separation of the three layers but the interaction between layers is still proprietary. In cloud-based architectures, each layer is fully separated and abstracted, both physically and logically, and the interaction between the layers themselves is based on external configuration. This is also also known as orchestration. This makes it possible to be automated, easily replicated in several data centres and adjusted and scaled to desired physical resources. It is the future for Amadeus and it is a futurethatwearewellonourwayto. Whyisabstractionandisolationsoimportant?Whydoesitmakesucha big difference? Applications are the real asset, containing the logic and customer value. By gaining full flexibility of how and where to deploy them,wegetthebenefitsthatimentionedwiththe NewNormal.For instance, you increase response times by deploying in a data centre closer to the customer region. Running in several data centres seamlessly allows us to ensure that there is always one system running. This is the base of continuous availability. Managing infrastructure resources and dealing with peak traffic is also a lot easier. These benefits are all associated with the Cloud. Here we are talking about securing those key benefits for the whole Amadeus system. We see that being cloud-compliant is a strong competitive advantage on the business side. Amadeus has been a SaaS (Software as a Service) provider to the travelindustryformorethan25years,andwewillcontinuetobe. We do not plan to make commercial offers in IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service)andPaaS(PlatformasaService).Wewanttocontinuetotake responsibility for the Platform and Infrastructure layers, as it brings benefits in the provision of a full end-to-end service to our customers. For infrastructure, Amadeus Global Operations will always keep full control and responsibility over the technical characteristics and operational support of the infrastructure, whether running in our own data centre or in other data centres or cloud provider facilities. 4

8 Inrecentyears,wehavere-engineeredallofoursystemstoanopen, service-oriented architecture. Moving early to relational databases and open platforms on Unix / Linux has been the enabler to develop a new-generation airline Passenger Processing System, Altéa. This would not have been possible staying on mainframes. Similarly, investing early on in web technology (from 1996) has enabled us to become the global leader in providing retailing platforms to airlines(eretail), with over 110 customers today, as well as being thefirstgdstodeliveraweb-basedgraphicalfrontofficeintheearly 2000 s. Furthermore, as an example of our continuous focus on innovation, today we are the only GDS that offers travel agencies a booking platform which is fully cloud-based and that allows them to switch seamlessly between cryptic and graphic content during any part of the booking process(amadeus Selling Platform Connect). The transition to cloud-based architecture is a R&D and Global Operations joint initiative, under the Amadeus Cloud Services umbrella. This is a combination of software, tools and practices. Cloudbased architecture will deliver substantial benefits to Amadeus. They provide a flexible and powerful framework for massive deployment and 5

9 distributed operations of very large transactional and data traffic. This fits perfectly with our ambitious growth plans. 5

10 Many people assume that the now seemingly ubiquitous term Cloud computing is about running a large collection of different servers (grids), or that it is simply about virtualisation. These base technologies are certainly used in cloud architectures. But in fact, the very notion of Cloud certainly in its truest sense actually demands something of a full-scale paradigm shift in traditional thinking, to the point where in cloud computing the data centre becomes managed as a single computer. We sometimes talk about software-managed data centres. With this in mind, because servers, storage and networks are intentionally treated as commodities, it is only global computing power that really matters. Of course, transitioning to this new mind-set(and new technological structure in tandem) requires some adaptation. But it also provides many shared and highly-valuable benefits in return, such as built-in scalability and an intrinsic tolerance to failure, increased flexibility, and simply by design, far better use of resources, meaning less operational issues and a quicker time to market. This is derived from key concepts, such as isolation, redundancy, automation for deployment and monitoring. 6

11 Everybody talks these days about the Cloud. It may, at first, appear justassimple asmovingallthe applications writtenin the past from mainframes to the Cloud. Thatisnotthecase.Itisverycomplexandwilltakeyearsandhuge investments to do so for many companies. For Amadeus, this technical adaptation does not require either the full re-write of the application nor a drastic change of functional code. This is because over recent years, we have already re-engineered all of our systems to open, service-oriented architecture. We are performing some adaptations, starting with the most mission-critical applications in order to get immediate benefits in terms of continuous availability and scalability. New applications are being written with cloud-based capabilities. In addition, even if the Cloud provides the hardware and software base, we also need to make the Cloud deliver. Amadeus is in a unique positiontodothis,asweowntheend-to-enddeliverychain(boththe softwareandourdatacentre)anddonotneedtoalignthirdparties. We use automation to monitor millions of data points automatically, to identify and counteract potential problems before they affect our customers. We are implementing techniques such as machine learning and artificial intelligence to move to the next level of effectiveness. Our engineers will move from building systems one-by-one to developing and improving automation that will enable us to manage hundreds or thousands of systems continuously. It is against this backdrop that at Amadeus we are fully embracing next-generation cloud services: adapting, transitioning and evolving our existing IT framework, including our systems and processes, to today s cloud environment. 6

12 This automation will also mean that we become a more customercentric organisation, where customer value will determine investments in service improvement. Wewillbeabletodeploysystemsforourcustomersintoremotecloud locations near to key markets to optimise user experience if necessary. As an example, we have launched Amadeus Airline Cloud Availability, which has been successfully piloted by Lufthansa using the Google Cloud Platform infrastructure as a service. It enables instances of airline data and revenue management logic to be deployed remotely onthecloud,onallcontinentstoservelocaldemand.thisisagreat example of how the Cloud and automation are delivering an improved service from an existing core service of Amadeus. In this case, it is about extremely high volume flight availability while maintaining the same high levels of accuracy. By synchronising the airline s central systems and the distributed instances of the airline s availability calculation in real-time, consumers can search and shop for airline offers more efficiently and receive close to 100% accurate results of the airline s availability. By being able to 7

13 respond to these exponentially growing shopping requests, the airline does not lose out on any sales opportunities while at the same time protecting their own central systems. The solution can be scaled up ondemand to meet the airline and channel needs, offering flexibility and efficiency. Combined with highly automated cloud infrastructure, it copes with any search peak, which means airlines do not need to anticipate such peaks several months in advance. We work closely with our customers and exchange real-time information on the health of their services via online dashboards. Business flexibility and speed will be increased further by providing automated online web-shops for services, for our business units to react as quickly as possible to changing customer demands. 7

14 Let snowlookatbigdata. Our customers, airlines and travel agents are very demanding in the contextualisation of offers and sales. They don t need raw data, but rather filtered information on behaviours and patterns that can help themtotargettherightoffertotherightcustomersandboostsales conversion. Customers need data-enriched transactions. Amadeus is uniquely positioned. We probably have access to the biggest and broadest data set in the travel industry. Through explicit data aggregation, but also implicit data collection, we believe we can provide a full 360 degree view of the traveller. With our 750 million daily flight searches coming from travel agents, OTAs, metasearch and airline web sites, close to 1 million Passenger Name Records transacted daily through our various GDS solutions, 2.2 million passengers processed daily by our IT solutions for airlines and airports (which will increase further with the launch of our IT portfolio for Hospitality and Rail), etc., it is clear that we have a fairly detailed knowledgeofwhattravellingdemandis,almostinrealtime.allofthis data can be interpreted into patterns, behaviours and then a correlation can be exploited to make transactions more targeted, both 8

15 for travellers and travel providers. For instance, narrowing the result of the search to a smaller set of recommendations that are highly relevant to the traveller. The global trend of merchandising can only be successful if it is contextual and personalised. This is what our customers are demanding and we are uniquely placed to make it happen. In order to create connection and intelligence from this transactional data, we are building a unified framework to easily aggregate data from all applications in our platform. There are many interesting challenges: data exists in various forms, including natural language, from various sources, and not all completely structured. There is an incredible amount of data generated from our transactions, but also from external sources. We need to have an efficient infrastructure to store, manage and retrieve information records. The most promising features require almost real time data analysis, to give a competitive advantage to our customers and travellers. Data mining implies progressively creating a knowledge of the fields through an automated learning process. We talk about machine learning. This is thebaseofavirtuouscycle:themoredata,themorerelevantanalysis of patterns, feeding back enriched transactions, generating more data andsoon.thisistheessenceofourtravel360initiative. Our cloud-based architecture is a key enabler to our strategy of Travel Intelligence and data-driven applications. We need distributed databases on a very large scale, with processing resources dynamically allocated (data mining is very intensive in calculation). We need to have a fast implementation cycle for any new type of data and problems to solve. WeareinvestinginasetoftechnicalframeworksdedicatedtoBigData in a transactional environment. Here too, we rely on mainstream technology, essentially Open Source, with partnerships when required. 8

16 In reality, it is all about finding patterns in a vast amount of data. Applying the right statistical models allows you to gain insights from the information at your disposal. The hidden patterns unveiled by the process make it possible to make predictions. This is what we call predictive analytics. This is how the retail industry is able to predict whatcustomersbuyaccordingtothetimeofthemonthorotheritems they have just purchased. In the travel industry, predictive analytics has many uses. The incredibly large amount of data, combined with predictive modelling, unlocks a realm of possibilities for airlines, airports, hotels, railway companies, travel agencies and, of course, travellers. Here are a few examples using predictive analytics components: Recommender systems for travel products(e.g. hotels, flights, ancillary services) There are thousands of possible combinations of flights connecting Los Angeles and New York, for example, and this figure goes through the roof when combining other possible services. But which travel 9

17 solutions and services are relevant for a given passenger? Which hotel isthemostattractiveforayoungcouplewhojustbookedtheirflights for their next summer holiday? Recommender systems provide win-win value for both users and travel providers by proposing the most valuable and relevant options to users while maximising revenues of travel providers. Predictive analytics help to better understand user needs and match this knowledge to possible products and services. Video, image, and voice recognition systems for travel purposes Our human brains respond to stimuli coming from different senses. They are better adapted to understand natural forms of communication like images or sounds rather than textual written information. With the development of Deep Learning and other Artificial Intelligence algorithms, the processing of this unstructured data is not science fiction anymore. Machines are now able to understand images and sounds, and in some cases, even better than the human brain. This brings new opportunities for applications in the travel industry: from inspiration(where to go?) to automation of reservations. Click and conversion optimisation for travel products and online advertising campaigns Online marketing is all about conversion, that is, the ability to sell products or services with minimum exposure. Attracting users to an advertisement is not enough if customers are not buying. New predictive algorithms could estimate conversion and help better define travel products, better place the advertisements and finally optimise advertising campaigns. These advanced algorithms, fed with enriched travel data, become more and more able to understand passenger needs, notably based on a combination of hundreds of specific factors that have been found to be relevant for travellers. This opens new areas and unlocks huge opportunities for online advertising. Social media analysis(e.g. sentiment analysis and profiling) Monitoringsocialnetworksisastrategictaskanditisnotpossibletodo it manually anymore. For example, it has been estimated that 90% of American travellers (who have smartphones) share photos and experiences about their trips on social networks. Similarly, millions of travel-related reviews are shared on the internet every day. Sentiment analysis permits the estimation of the polarity of these posts (e.g. reviews, tweets) in milliseconds. That means knowing if they are positive, negative, and so forth. Predictive analytics have also been used on social networks to better know users, their interests and needs.justtellme who your friends areandhow youwrite,and the 9

18 algorithmswilltellyouwhoyouare(orwhatyoulooklike). Alerting and monitoring The travel industry generates huge volumes of data. For example Amadeusprocessmorethan1billiontransactionsperdayinoneofits data centres. New aircraft have close to 6,000 sensors generating more than 2 Terabytes per day. Obviously this data cannot be analysed by human beings. Using supervised machine learning algorithms, known defects can be anticipated when a combination of factors are observed, much like how a set of symptoms help doctors diagnose a particular disease (with some probability). On the other hand, unsupervised learning algorithms help detect anomalies to generate alerts when some data observation becomes suspicious. Smart Fraud Detection There are more than 3 billion air passengers per year worldwide. This generates a large number of online transactions that need to be validated in real-time. Losses from fraud in payments and other related transactions are significant. Predictive analytics play an important role detecting fraud and even cyber-attacks on travel systems. The main challenge on these kinds of applications is to balance the trade-off between the number of true detected issues against the false positive cases. You may have experienced cases of credit card rejections when travelling abroad. This is an example of a false positive that should be taken into account to improve these algorithms. 9

19 API stands for Application Programming Interface. This is a mechanism for two systems to communicate and exchange data and services. Usuallyonesystemcallstheotherwitharequesttogetanactiondone or get information as a set of data. This is what is referred to as a Service. For instance, an online travel agency system will call Amadeus with a request based on a date, an origin and destination, and will obtain a result set of 200 available priced itineraries ready to book (which would be a next API call for an action). In many cases, the mechanism is bi-directional: each system can be the caller or the receiver. API can be seen as the technical mechanism to support exchanges of services as a business. The API concept has been around for a long time under various designations and technical forms. In the domain of air travel, IATA s Edifact is a kind of standard API available since the 1980 s (and its new version, IATA NDC). However, more recently a number of technological evolutions have transformed what was a technical element for system integration into a powerful driver for business value creation. AmadeuswasthefirstGDStointroduceastructuredAPIbackin

20 We have published new versions based on XML and Web Services in Today we expose more than 1,000 services out of our central applications, not counting the API exposed for the web front-ends and mobile.wealreadyhavealargeecosystemofpartnersusingtheapito customise our applications or create new ones: 2,200 customers, or 160 billion transactions per year. We are fundamentally building our Open API by interacting with our customers and some third parties, either directly or by anticipation of the requirements for integration in our various applications. The technical framework itself is based on state-of-the-art technologies and standards, including standards specific to the travel industry. Within our systems, the same API approach is used to logically separate our application modules so that any of them can benefit from theservicesofferedbyothers.thisisthecoreapi. One particular benefit we expect is to boost innovation, both internally and from new entrants, making sure that Amadeus is a preferred backend for any functionality dealing with travel. In the context of our Start-up Innovation Program, which also includes Hackathons, we have already published a set of APIs as a Sandbox(i.e. on production-alike systems) for any third party to exercise Amadeus services. 10

21 Adoption of new and disruptive technologies, like social networks, mobile, Big Data, Cloud and Internet of Things/Everything, is not an optionforourcustomersortousas wehave justexplained. These technologies on their own and in their Nexus introduce new types of vulnerabilities, opening up avenues for cyber attacks and elevating organisational risk. There is today a greater consciousness about the ineffectiveness of static technical controls and the need to accept the reality of operating businesses in a compromised state. In this state, detection, response andrecoverybecomeimportant,andinthecomingyearswewillsee many organisations turn their attention to identifying Indicators of Compromise and implementing Enterprise Incident Response Plans. Increasing numbers of organisations will build in-house capability or retain on-demand service for recovering evidence, conducting root cause analysis of the incident(not just the symptoms) and conducting forensic investigation. At Amadeus, our policies follow the best practices of the IT industry, securing our data, securing our products, securing our people, responding to security incidents and Achieving Full Security 11

22 Compliance(for example, ISO27001 certification for Global Operations, PCI-DSS certification or SSAE16 compliance). Building a big wall and alert infrastructure around our systems is indeed a good practice, that we, at Amadeus, have done from the beginning. It is a given. What we are talking about here is understanding the dynamic of frauds and misuse, building sophisticated alert mechanisms in order to minimise the impact of potential security incidents. Our Smart Fraud Detection initiative is precisely based on a dynamic approach to contextual security, leveraging supervised and unsupervised machine learning with the clear objective to be as adaptive as possible as new fraud practices emerge. 11

23 The travel market is becoming more and more complex, with the emergence of powerful ecosystems, - some centred around travel, some coming from other domains and extending to travel. There are new entrants. Some are major technology companies capable of applying scalable techniques to include travel in their applications. Some are start-up companies that can leverage Cloud capabilities to quickly build niche functionalities. However, none of them enjoys the position of Amadeus. We own a very large portfolio of travel-dedicated applications, combined with the capability to quickly leverage all cloud techniquesonaverylargescalewiththelargestcustomerbaseofthe travel industry. As we have explained, our customer and also traveller needs require a fundamental change of paradigm in the technical requirements of systems: _ Alotmoretransactionpowerisneeded,notjustbecausethetraffic is globally increasing, but also because consumers expect more intelligence when it comes to arranging their travel. The customercentric approach, which all players are promoting in travel, requires the processing of massive amounts of data to deliver personalised and context-sensitive transactions. 12

24 _ Continuous system availability and fast response times are critical factors for adoption and conversion in online channels. Customers now count transaction flows in dollars, not in megabits! _ Advanced security is simply a must in the digital world, and the base for trust between all intermediaries. Amadeus understands all of these challenges very well. Throughout this presentation, we have shown that our past technology investments have always been driven by anticipating major evolutions in the travel market. We can go fast, with tangible efficiencies in terms of costs and quality of delivery. Technical frameworks are one dimension of the challenges ahead. Even if some of these technologies are accessible to others, we believe that Amadeus is uniquely positioned to leverage them to the highest scale because we fundamentally preserve our investment in the applications in which we have invested over the past 25 years. These are the core assets of Amadeus. Our strength and differentiation lies also in the full control of both Development and Operations. Evolving to Cloud-based architectures requires a continuum to introduce automation over the full product cycle, from software engineering to deployment and operations. Companies which will succeed in this environment are those who are ready to leverage technology to power new business opportunities created by this complexity and race for scale. Amadeus will definitely be one of these companies, with the clear ambition to be a leading platform of reference in the Travel ecosystem. 12

25 Thank you. 13