Infosys launches cloud solution for airlines industry

Indian IT services and consulting major Infosys on Wednesday announced the launch of Infosys Cobalt Airline Cloud (ICAC), a cloud offering designed for commercial airlines to help them accelerate their digital transformation journey.  

Infosys said in a regulatory filing that this “first-of-its-kind industry offering is aimed to revolutionize passenger experiences, drive operational efficiency, and contribute to the airline's sustainability initiatives, more specifically in the net zero journeys for clients. 

The company said that the ICAC platform is built on composable architecture principles that draw from the overall framework of Infosys Cobalt, a set of services, solutions and platforms for enterprises to accelerate their cloud journey.  

The platform provides solutions, APIs and re-usable business assets that can be used for transforming the legacy workloads through disassembling and creating composable functional capabilities, enabled by cloud technologies. It also helps in improving customer experiences by ensuring accuracy in baggage delivery, leveraging precision-based gate to gate bag transfers, helping reduce Missed Bag Rate (MBR) in hub airports by up to 50%, Infosys said in a statement. 

Infosys Cobalt that will offer multi-cloud opportunities, and innovate at scale, with regulatory and security frameworks, will further ensure smooth operations and enhancing passenger safety by leveraging AI for crowd control, theft, security, and reducing cost of manual airport operations and most importantly, help in decarbonisation efforts and emission control. 

“The launch of Infosys Cobalt Airline Cloud is a significant milestone in our journey of digital innovation. This pioneering industry cloud solution demonstrates our commitment to empowering the airline industry with a scalable and flexible IT ecosystem that caters to the unique challenges faced by the industry,” Ashiss Kumar Dash, EVP & Global Head - Services, Utilities, Resources and Energy, Infosys, said. 

A study done earlier this month by Infosys Knowledge Institute (IKI), a research arm of Infosys, noted, only 47% of the current cloud commitments has been utilised and over $300 billion in corporate cloud commitments remain untapped. The report indicated that while companies will continue to invest in cloud, less than half of the committed spend is actually being utilised. “While this does not indicate a near-term problem, companies that fail to meet their cloud contracts stand to face higher costs as cloud providers renegotiate contracts,” said the report. 

Moreover, airlines and other players in the travel industry—hotels, airports, and car rental services—as per experts – lag behind other sectors like health care, retail, and manufacturing in the cloud-adoption journey, partly owing to being a lower-margin business and also dealing with adding tech upgrades to decades-old systems. Only 30% of travel companies today are implementing cloud at scale, according to an Accenture report released in November 2022, with another 35% in the process of implementing cloud in some units of the organization for specific purposes. 

On Tuesday, Infosys announced it will expand its collaboration with Microsoft to accelerate enterprise cloud transformation, which it said will give enterprises the best of Infosys Cobalt cloud offerings and Microsoft’s cloud computing technologies, led by Azure. The collaboration will entail onboarding Infosys Cobalt solutions to Microsoft’s industry clouds, to enable enterprises to build agile cloud-powered platforms and innovate at scale, it said.