Published on : Friday, November 22, 2013
Amadeus, a leading technology partner for the global travel industry, is once again on top of its sector’s ranking as one of the leading European companies in Research & Development investment, as confirmed by the 2013 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scorecard.
This report, published on an annual basis by the European Commission (EC), examines the largest 1,000 European companies, and the world’s 2,000 largest companies investing in R&D during 2012, and ranks them according to the total amount invested.
Amadeus invested €440.3 million in 2012, a 26.7% increase versus 2011, which represented 15.1% of the company’s total revenues. This level of investment positions Amadeus as the leader of both the European and the Global rankings in the travel and tourism industry category. Furthermore, Amadeus is the only IT travel industry company included in the global 2,000 companies ranking published by the EC.
Hervé Couturier, Head of R&D at Amadeus says: “R&D investment is key to innovation, and innovation is part of our DNA. We are very proud that, once again, the European Commission rankings confirm our commitment to keep on investing in R&D in order to continue to expand and upgrade our portfolio. This is reflected by the 26.7% R&D growth versus last year’s EU Scorecard and the 2.5 percentage points increase as a percentage of our revenues”.
He continues: “Amadeus’ track record in innovation is a key driver for both the growth of the company and its current leading position in research and development investment more specifically. The 2013 EU Industrial R&D Investment Scorecard results further confirm our continued commitment to remain at the forefront of innovation”.
Amadeus has sixteen R&D centres around the world (Nice, London, Sydney, Antwerp, Aachen, Frankfurt, Boston, Miami, Toronto, Strasbourg, Tucson, Bangalore, Bogota, Warsaw, Istanbul and Bangkok), with a team of 5,000 people. Also, over the years the company has established close collaboration with research teams in leading institutes throughout the world, such as the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston (on revenue management mathematics), ETH -Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-in Zurich (on high performance systems engineering), and Institut National Polytechnique (INP) in Grenoble (on airline schedule & operations).
In recent years Amadeus’ R&D efforts have been particularly focused on:
Extremely high performance transaction processing under stringent system availability and dependability requirements;
Information mining from very large data-bases;
Super-responsive travel search engines;
Multi-channel customer servicing applications (agent desktop, web, kiosk, mobile, tablets);
Pioneering the use of open systems.
Examples of the impact this has had on innovation in Amadeus product and services in recent years include:
In 2012, Amadeus successfully continued to grow its Airline IT portfolio, into Revenue Accounting: British Airways has become the first airline to sign for Amadeus’ new Passenger Revenue Accounting solution and is scheduled to migrate to the new solution in early 2014. This next generation passenger revenue accounting solution, built using modern technology and embracing the latest industry standards, enables real-time revenue monitoring for faster, more accurate revenue decisions.
Amadeus also made inroads with Ground Handling Companies thanks to Altéa DCS for Ground Handlers, a community platform developed by working closely with ground handlers. Today 33 ground handling companies use our solution.
To boost the sale of rail products and ease rail operations, Amadeus has been cooperating closely with large European rail providers and major Travel Management Companies to create Amadeus Total Rail. The solution enables railways to manage operations and sell seats across multiple sales channels and allows travel sellers access to book rail and air services side-by-side within the same solution. The offering includes Amadeus Global Rail Sales Platform, which is the first rail GDS on offer, and Amadeus Rail Operations Engine, which allows railway companies to manage schedules, inventory, fares and pricing.
In the online travel flight search area, Amadeus delivered an industry first solution making flight search more relevant and simpler for travellers with Amadeus Featured Results™. This solution instantly delivers the four most relevant bookable travel options available -fastest, cheapest, most popular and sponsored.
Also in 2012, Amadeus signed a global partnership agreement with Akamai, the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences. This will help improve the performance of all web-based applications used by Amadeus and its customers, including airline e-Commerce websites and Amadeus’ own suite of booking tools. Airlines, travel agencies and TMCs will all benefit from improvement in online responses of up to five times previous speeds, leading to increased revenues and a cutting-edge user experience.
Amadeus will be the first IT provider to the airline industry which has most of its systems on open source software. In 2012, Amadeus published ‘Open for business’, authored by leading technology expert Professor Jim Norton. The report made the case for the travel industry to embrace open source software in order to benefit from greater innovation, respond faster to industry change and reduce costs, whilst freeing the industry from its reliance on proprietary software to provide greater competitive advantage. Leading innovations online, including Amadeus e-Retail, Amadeus Dynamic Website Manager and Amadeus Extreme Search have been built with extensive use of open source components in a way that would not be possible using legacy components. Amadeus ARIA Templates – the framework upon which Amadeus IT Group’s web solutions are based – was recently made open source, allowing third party developers to use it without charge.
In the Hospitality area, Amadeus has continued the development of the Amadeus Hotel Platform, a solution for hotel chains which combines central reservation, property management and global distribution systems into one fully integrated platform.
The online corporate travel booking tool, Amadeus e-Travel Management (AeTM), has undergone a completely new workflow redesign, streamlining the booking process itself, making it easier and faster to search, book, review and approve. We also introduced a mobile booking app, Amadeus e-Travel Management Mobile. This new tool allows travellers to make new air and rail bookings via their mobile devices including iPhone and Android, ensuring efficiency and continuity of service for travellers on the road.
Source: Amadeus.
Tags: amadeus, ec, european commision, R&D, research and development, technology news, travel technology
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