Amadeus Signs Global Partnership Agreement with Akamai

Amadeus has signed a global partnership agreement with Akamai, a leading cloud platform, to improve the performance of all web-based services and applications used by Amadeus and its customers, including airline e-Commerce websites and Amadeus’ own suite of booking tools.

Under the terms of the agreement, Amadeus customers across all segments will be able to leverage the benefits of the Akamai Intelligent Platform, which provides route, protocol and application layer optimisations for the internet in order to deliver content and applications more quickly, reliably, and securely.

The partnership between Amadeus and Akamai was trialled through test scenarios for five Amadeus customers from 28 countries worldwide. As part of the pilot for airline e-Commerce customers in particular, one large network carrier’s home-page response time performed 3.7 times faster than before. At the same time, the response time for accessing Amadeus’ owns Flex Pricer calendar via the Amadeus e-Retail engine was 3.1 times quicker than previous speeds.

“Improved responsiveness across all of our web-based applications and services at Amadeus essentially means increased revenues for our customers. By combining the globally distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform with our own leading technology platforms, applications and solutions, customers can ensure the data their own customers are accessing is located closer to them, which drastically improves response times and the overall user experience,” said Denis Lacroix, Vice President of Product Development, Sales and e-Commerce Platforms, Amadeus. “Amadeus of course wants to ensure only the very best global performance for all users accessing our applications, regardless of location. Our tests prove that overall response speeds can be improved by two to three times, and in some cases up to nearly five times previous speeds. We very much look forward to offering this service to our existing customers across the Amadeus portfolio.”

Since the advent of e-Commerce, consumer expectations of website performance have increased dramatically and the average time for site abandonment has fallen from 8 seconds in 1999, to just 3 seconds in 2009. Furthermore, recent research from The Aberdeen Group (‘Simic, Bojan, “The Performance of Web Applications: Customers Are Won or Lost in One Second” November 2008, Aberdeen Group’) found that a one second delay in response time results in a 16% drop in customer satisfaction and subsequently a 7% fall in conversion rates. 

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