If you’ve taken a trip in the past 30 years, then you’ve probably used Amadeus technology. Our solutions connect over 1.5 billion travellers every year to the journeys they want, linking them via travel agents, search engines, and tour operators to over 700 airlines, 110 airports, 580,000 hotel properties, 40 car rental companies, 90 railways, and more.

In 2016, over 595 million total travel agency bookings were processed using the Amadeus distribution platform. In addition, over 175 Amadeus airline customers processed over 1.3 billion passengers using Amadeus’ Passenger Service Systems. We combine an understanding of how people travel with the development of the most complex, trusted, critical systems our customers need.

A platform for scalability and speed

In today’s crowded travel marketplace, our customers want IT solutions that can scale up to match their complex needs—whether this includes solving the challenge of ever increasing flight search volumes, delivering flight search results in milliseconds, or enabling “pop-up” check-in and bag drop from anywhere.

Amadeus operates at large scale with hundreds of thousands of transactions processed per second to deliver mission-critical services in travel. Having a scalable and secure platform is essential to continue driving solutions for our customers, and Apigee’s API management platform fulfills this objective.

At the same time, our customers also want solutions that can adapt quickly with new features and upgrades. We’re talking days, not weeks or months. Apigee provides on-premise gateways to securely expose our APIs to our customers. These can be scaled to deliver our APIs according to our business needs. Apigee’s great capacity to create rock-solid API infrastructure gives us more freedom to focus on the architectural details of the technology we create for the travel industry.

A platform for collaboration

In the fast-paced and competitive travel industry, our customers hunger for new ways of doing things. This hunger can only be met with an open and collaborative approach across the sector.

That’s why we use an open systems architecture that offers SOAP/XML and REST/JSON formatting to be entirely platform neutral. It is totally independent of language and application frameworks, making implementation fast and efficient.

But as the number of customers using our APIs grows, so does the need to shorten the time to deploy our applications to market and evolve our API strategy.

The Apigee platform is key here. For one thing, it’s always up to date with constantly evolving industry standards, in particular with security standards like OAuth.

The platform also forms the backbone for the web app development cycle for Amadeus and our customers to jointly build applications and release them in production. Ultimately, by integrating Apigee’s control plane seamlessly with our APIs, we are able to foster fully automated operations.

A platform for visibility

Understanding how our APIs are consumed is also key for us and our customers. With Apigee we are able to see this and provide them with a detailed view of API analytics. In this big data era, knowing the number of transactions, response times on APIs, or the page travellers are spending the most time on with a mobile app could be invaluable to make the informed decisions that help us maintain an edge over competitors. This also serves as a great feedback tool to closely monitor where the industry is heading.

As a leader in travel technology, we’re committed to open systems. That’s why Amadeus also works with Kubernetes. We have a strong partnership with Red Hat through its OpenShift platform, which is based on Kubernetes. Amadeus Cloud Services works with this open-source system and enables us to use automated cloud methods to deploy our services in a flexible mix of private and public clouds.

We’re excited to collaborate with players like Google and Apigee, because together we can pave the way for technology that makes better journeys and creates value for our customers, travelers, and society.

Olivier Richaud is senior manager, API management & web services, technology platforms & engineering, at Amadeus. Xavier Gardien is head of portfolio and product management, technology platforms & engineering, at Amadeus.

PwC, one of the “Big Four” accounting firms, is well-known for professional services structured around auditing, insurance, tax, legal, and traditional management consulting. In Australia, the PwC Innovation and Ventures group has taken the global lead in building new, technology-based, turnkey lines of business outside of PwC’s traditional service areas. Applying its insights and knowledge base to the company’s vast amounts of existing data, PwC has uncovered new revenue models, distinct from its traditional, labor-intensive services.

Traditionally, people at PwC connected to critical data in response to scheduled tasks or crises in order to provide independent advice, often after the fact, when there’s little runway to make considered business decisions. The company wanted to move beyond the status quo, where people connected to static data and where benchmarking, deeper insights, and alerts were often an afterthought. Expertise gained from analyzing data and drawing valuable insights often was limited to individuals—it didn’t scale. PwC aimed to leap forward technologically and build utility and value for its customers through the development of a vibrant API-based ecosystem.

Innovation From Down Under

Australia is helping to lead the way at PwC from a software and development perspective. Early on, the Innovation and Ventures group decided to collaborate with PwC New Zealand, which leads the world in cloud general ledger adoption. The group represents the first with over 20% of its customer companies keeping their general ledgers in the cloud (that figure is currently around 35%), and serves as an early example of what can be achieved with APIs based on cloud general ledger data.

Accessing proprietary data (most significantly general ledger data), transforming it, and connecting it to an ecosystem of partners and clients via APIs, has quickly proved a winning formula for PwC, in the form of its Next platform, which combines multiple cloud accounting tools and integrated cloud applications in an open platform. It also includes customizable dashboards that provide a holistic view of a client’s entire portfolio, including business trends, in real time.

“By our very nature, we’re a people and services business, evolving into a data business. The biggest help that Apigee has provided in this transformation is in helping us expose core, rich data so that our people who provide services today can actually demonstrate value in the market tomorrow.”

— Trent Lund, PwC Australia

In developing the firm’s first technology products, PwC Australia’s Head of Innovation and Ventures Trent Lund was adamant that as an accounting firm, PwC never spend a dollar building something that technology professionals had already done better. That credo led Lund to select Google’s Apigee as PwC’s platform of choice for developing productized APIs.

Cloud-first Strategy

Increasingly, the datasets PwC wants to connect with are from public sources and open APIs coming from cloud providers. The Apigee toolset is perfectly positioned for Lund’s team’s focus on data connectivity—especially now that Apigee is part of Google, Lund says.

“The Apigee integration into Google is really helpful for us because we can connect in with that same ecosystem. Our team is relatively small by global standards, so we really don’t have time to try and foster multiple technology relationships,” Lund says. “We need to have deep, trusted relationships where we can get a level of sharing now and into the future, and that’s what we get with Apigee.”

PwC Australia continues to innovate and build the platform, but rather than continuing to pay for development from its local innovation fund, the platform is now funded globally so that it can be accelerated and shared across four countries. Australia, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States are simultaneously guiding the platform’s requirements and features as PwC develops with an awareness of each country’s individual regulations.

For example, compliance with the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and China’s data residency rules would be far more complicated without a single technology partner like Apigee that experiences the same global challenges as part of Google, Lund says.