AWS, the cloud business arm of Amazon, announces that Star Alliance, the world’s largest airline alliance, has reached an agreement to reinvent its cloud infrastructure on AWS to reduce costs, enhance performance, and become a more agile company in the cloud. Star Alliance is working with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to migrate all of its data, platforms, and business-critical applications to AWS and permanently close its data centers. The new move by the company is expected to reduce its infrastructure total cost of ownership by 25 percent.

The airline alliance, which provides smooth transfers across an extensive global network with rewards and recognition for frequent international travelers, is using AWS’s capabilities, including analytics, security, managed databases, storage, and machine learning. The alliance today has a total of 26 member airlines. The new agreement will provide them with real-time insights that will help improve the global travel experience for their passengers, even with the uncertainty brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic.

TCS’ strategic partnership with Star Alliance spans over 15 years and multiple geographies. Of late, TCS had successfully completed a large-scale cloud migration project to help the company improve speed to market, provide seamless customer experiences during interline travels, and reduce the number of third country operators involved for member carriers.

In an issued statement, Jeremy Drury, Head of Digital & Technology at Star Alliance, said, “We decided to go all-in on AWS to gain the reliability and scalability we needed to support the increasing number of global travelers joining the alliance each year, but the pandemic also proved how valuable it is to have a flexible and agile infrastructure in the cloud. No one could have predicted what has happened so far in 2020, but because of our collaboration with AWS, we were able to quickly adjust our goals and scale back our expenses. In addition to cost savings and elasticity, AWS gives us the most comprehensive set of cloud services to innovate rapidly, introduce new services to keep travelers safe, and continuously reinvent the global travel experience.”

Commenting on the occasion, David Peller, Managing Director, Travel and Hospitality at Amazon Web Services, said, “By going all-in on AWS, Star Alliance is leveraging the elasticity of the cloud to take advantage of industry trends and pivot their operations in order to respond to drastically changing market dynamics. Star Alliance is a prime example of a global organization that has successfully embraced the cloud to steer through times of uncertainty. As the world anticipates opening up again, we are excited to work with Star Alliance as they leverage AWS’s comprehensive suite of services to innovate new offerings at scale while raising the bar for what is possible for the next era of global air travel.”

“The global pandemic has reinforced the need for the travel industry to embrace new technologies that improve their operational resilience, business agility, and responsiveness to evolving customer needs and local regulations,” said Arun Pradeep, Head, Travel, Transportation and Hospitality, Europe, TCS. “Having accelerated Star Alliance’s IT transformation on AWS, we are now helping them maximize value by harnessing capabilities around advanced analytics and machine learning to deliver higher levels of personalization and superior customer experiences.”

The five airliners, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, Thai Airways and United founded Star Alliance in 1997. Its current CEO is Jeffrey Goh and its headquarters is located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany.