Agile transformation and transition to the cloud is critical to the success of airline digital programs and to drive innovation to meet the ever-evolving expectations of travellers. Following an extensive analysis of potential partners to support the Datalex cloud native journey, Datalex selected AWS given its expertise in the travel and hospitality domain. Together, Datalex and AWS have taken the initiative to transform the way in which managed services are offered, taking a phased approach (transition, optimise and adopt) to bring the most value to Datalex’s airline customers.
Working with AWS allows Datalex to access the most advanced cloud platform and over 75 fully-managed services. Moreover, given AWS expertise in the travel and hospitality sector, they have aggregated industry-specific learnings that they recommend, which Datalex in turn delivers to our airline customers.
With this partnership in place with AWS – Air Transat and Datalex made the decision to migrate the Air Transat hosted application to Amazon AWS Cloud.
Business Challenge/ Context
The AWS partnership provides the opportunity to transition Datalex airline customers to the AWS cloud – for greater agility, cost and time efficiencies and faster time to market with new services and innovation.Migrating the hosted Air Transat application to AWS Cloud was to specifically address the below challenges:
- Hosting costs were fixed in nature and not usage based
- All infrastructure hosted in the Atlanta datacentre were CapEx purchases, depreciating assets, and delivery times were inconsistent
- Scalability was problematic as new infrastructure had to be planned, purchased, built, and tested well in advance of any Air Transat deliveries
- The addition and removal of servers from the farm was a manual process
- Frictionless disaster recovery was not supported
- Multiple tools were used for monitoring and security – increasing complexity
Solution
In line with Datalex’s cloud native approach, Datalex migrated the Air Transat application to AWS. AWS allows for the right sizing of resources required to support a customer solution at all times, while allowing for rapid scaling to meet future upswing in demand. In addition, off the shelf services offered by AWS, enable rapid prototyping and accelerated product innovation with improved time to market.
The key benefits of migrating Air Transat to AWS are as follows:
- Cost Management – AWS provides a very flexible and simple cost management model enabling Datalex to provide a “pay-as-you-use” model to Air Transat.
- Scalability - AWS supports unlimited server capacity whereby servers can easily be added or removed, aligned with the Air Transat demand. This is particularly beneficial for promotions where additional capacity is added and removed for the duration of the promotion. The scaling capabilities and elasticity of AWS enables Datalex to automatically increase hosting resources in real time to meet spikes in traveler demand, and automatically scale down as demand tapers off.
- Security – In partnership with AWS, Datalex provides cloud-based applications with increased levels of security, reliability, and dependability.
- Increased Resilience – In line with AWS supporting multiple availability zones Datalex provides high availability solutions, minimising customer downtime and providing business continuity
- Performance – Datalex has strengthened the overall application performance with this new cloud native approach in AWS - thereby improving response times
- Application Monitoring – Through the single AWS monitoring tool, Datalex has reduced the complexity and streamlined the process for supporting customers.
Results/ Impact
Migrating the Air Transat application to AWS brings the solution in line with the Datalex’s cloud native approach where everything lives in the cloud. This transition ensures much greater agility, flexibility, scalability, performance, security, resilience, and reliability. This has served to remove barriers and simplify processes, significantly increasing speed to market, and reducing costs.
As Air Transat continues to work with Datalex to optimise their retail offering, they have the added confidence knowing our 30+ years of experience is backed up by the innovation of AWS. We are aligned in our focus; to resolve the most pressing digital retailing and servicing issues now and in parallel, build for the long-term needs of Air Transat’s digital transformation strategy.
Datalex has a long-term vision and plan to enable airlines to excel in digital retailing – where airlines can really make a difference to their customers, and to their bottom line. With AWS as the foundational strategic enabler, Datalex can accelerate its digital strategy and that of our customers, deliver faster on our roadmap, and deliver better value to our customers.
“Since our Go-Live in December 2020, we have been impressed with the performance, resilience, and stability of our Datalex e-commerce solution hosted on the AWS cloud platform. The migration to AWS was well planned and executed, resulting in no disruptions. Congratulations to the Datalex team and great job!”
Bamba Sissoko
VP Information Systems at Air Transat
