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The airline industry is facing fresh new headwinds.

Over the past years, the volume of passengers and cargo have spiked to new heights. Spurred by economic growth, globalization and an increasing consumer appetite to discover new horizons, more consumers and goods are taking to the skies.

Consumer expectations, led by global digitization, are soaring. Travelers want ease of use, flexibility and instantaneous response from the airlines. There was an urgent need to digitize and drive deeper engagement with consumers.

Intense competition is adding additional strain on the industry. New low-cost budget carriers and expanding coverage from other major airlines are putting more choices in front of consumers. To drive loyalty, airline companies need to exceed expectations, not just merely meet them.

Building the Right Foundations

Cathay Pacific Airways understood these challenges well. As one of the top global carriers, we are continually looking for ways to become more agile, improve our time-to-market of our services and solidify our platform stability.

The answer to addressing the rising challenges lay in simplifying our IT. By doing so, we can empower application developers to navigate our backend infrastructure easily and develop the right services promptly. It also simplifies maintenance and allows the IT team to focus more on value-added tasks.

These were the key reasons behind our Target Application Migration (TAM) initiative. It was a foundational project that aims to lay the groundwork for the company’s multi-year IT transformation journey. It was also the most crucial step of the journey, as it involved the migration of 117 critical applications running on legacy platforms.

The risk was high but so was the urgency to get it down quickly and smoothly. So, after an exhaustive search, we chose IBM to be our strategic partner to help TAM take off.

Blueprint for Collaboration

From the onset, IBM understood the enormous challenges for TAM

The schedule was tight. The critical applications had time constraints and dependencies. We were also staring at multiple scheduled and ad hoc code change freezes, and a short decommission window for legacy components. These meant that IBM had to deliver TAM within 20 months.

First, IBM looked to minimize miscommunication and improve transparency. In a complex project like TAM, which involves various stakeholders and departments across both organizations, communications becomes the cornerstone for success.

To ensure everyone was on the right page, IBM organized walkthrough sessions for each deliverable with the various stakeholders. Where coordination was required with other vendors, IBM took over the reins. They worked closely with the multiple parties, keeping the communications transparent and developing a well-defined escalation process.

Preparing for Unplanned Turbulence

Planning was equally crucial as TAM involved many mission-critical applications and the risks were high. We also knew that getting TAM wrong was not an option.

A detailed migration plan by IBM helped immensely. It featured rollback strategies and leveraged virtualization and cloud management technologies to ensure we always had adequate resources. A streamlined approval process also removed any decision bottlenecks.

IBM backed their efforts with a range of services that included application development, baseline and regression functional and non-functional test execution, and deployment. The strong focus on planning and communication assured all the stakeholders that we were in safe hands.

Pragmatism and Professionalism Helps

Through strong teamwork, TAM was completed on schedule. All 117 critical applications were migrated, including four ISD database upgrade batches and four additional database upgrade batches.

The additional cloud resources and planning helped to avoid any potential outages, allying fears to ongoing operations. The fact that there was no rollback executive throughout TAM’s execution is a testament to the success of IBM’s planning efforts.

Part of the success lay in IBM’s pragmatic and professional attitude toward driving TAM. When there were concerns, they took proactive action without hesitation, initiating actions that led to quick problem resolutions.

Elevating Customer Engagement

The successful completion of TAM offered us many benefits.

For example, the standardization and consolidation of the application platforms helped us to use IBM services to manage the platforms. It reduced our workload and freed the team to add more value to the business and not be bogged down maintenance schedules.

We are also now able to drive the various digital transformation initiatives to make Cathay Pacific more agile, competitive and responsive to changing consumer expectations while staying confident on the stability of our platform.

The ultimate benefactors of TAM will be our customers. We are now able to engage them with new services and products and explore ways to personalize our interactions further and create unique experiences. In short, it gave us the ability to drive our vision to be the world’s best airline.