American Airlines to Migrate Some Applications to IBM Cloud

American planes at the gate in Miami

American Airlines will use IBM’s public cloud offering to host some of its enterprise applications, the two companies said Tuesday.

In a continuation of a decades-long partnership, the Fort Worth airline named IBM its cloud partner and said it will move “select enterprise applications” to the IBM Cloud, although it did not specify which. The deal, however, will include software, services, and infrastructure.

The airline had previously said it wanted to move some customer-facing and back office applications to the cloud.

IBM’s cloud offering spans 50 data centers in 17 countries. Companies frequently utilize cloud providers in lieu of building and operating their own data centers. Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

The move is expected to also give American access to IBM’s advanced analytics capabilities and technologies, including Watson, the tech company’s question answering platform that uses advanced natural language processing, automated reasoning, machine learning, and information retrieval to provide answers to questions posed in natural language. It is named after IBM’s first CEO, Thomas J. Watson.

IBM and American Airlines have been working together on various technology platforms since the 1950s, when the two jointly developed Sabre, the first electronic reservation and ticketing system in the airline industry.

(Photo: Accura Media Group)