Dive Brief:

• IBM announced Tuesday that American Airlines (AA) will use IBM Cloud as the foundation for a "massive" cloud transformation, according to an IBM announcement. The move is designed to make internal processes more efficient, easier and better prepared to handle site traffic during high volume periods.

• The announcement builds on the cloud partnership IBM and AA announced in November. American Airlines plans to migrate it’s website, customer-facing mobile applications, airport kiosks and some critical enterprise workloads to the IBM Cloud.

• IBM Cloud will also allow American Airlines developers to quickly build and change application functionalities for their customers. Working with IBM global services, the airline will use a micro-services architecture, design thinking, agile methodology, DevOps and lean development to efficiently create new applications. 

Dive Insight:

The airline industry has struggled to modernize its infrastructure, and as a result has suffered a number of recent computer failures. By moving to the cloud, AA hopes to avoid similar problems while also improving the customer experience, business processes and communications.

Once the airline is migrated off its legacy infrastructure, it can rely on IBM as its services provider to ensure applications stay running. With more bandwidth, and dedicated infrastructure staff, AA will hopefully not have to deal with large-scale and damaging outages. 

It’s a big win for IBM, which recently lost one of its biggest customers, WhatsApp, when Facebook moved the app in-house. Big Blue does not have the leading cloud, however it stacks up well against its competitors. IBM’s cloud service currently ranks fourth behind AWS, Microsoft and Google, according to Synergy Research.

But IBM may now be in a good position with its cloud services. While Amazon Web Services and Microsoft have become massive, IBM has enough big-name customers to reassure companies it’s a good choice.