Amadeus has announced it has signed a strategic partnership with California-based Couchbase to use high-performance data management in order to improve the online travel shopping experience.

Couchbase is the leading provider of open-source and NoSQL database technologies, and the company behind the Couchbase opensource project.

Following the deal Couchbase will be supporting Amadeus with its availability applications, ensuring that travellers wishing to book fares online will only see prices which are both up-to-date and available for purchase following the search process.

Importantly, this level of real-time fare accuracy can only be reached via a highly effective data management backbone, where information is replicated within milliseconds.

With millions of flight options available today from increasing numbers of meta-search and online travel agencies around the world, accuracy of real-time fare evaluation is clearly critical to the online shopping experience, removing in turn the frustration of travellers failing to conclude their shopping online.

This first pilot activity with Couchbase will apply to all online solutions available via Amadeus’ distribution networks and commences immediately.

As part of the agreement, Couchbase and Amadeus will also be working together to introduce more scalability and flexibility to Amadeus’ service-oriented architecture across its broader existing product line.

This will provide an opportunity to build new products and applications, or extend existing product portfolios.

It is planned that prototypes will be implemented in 2014 and that this new class of applications will reach the market in 2015/2016.

The partnership will also ensure for Amadeus more generally:

• Consistent high performance (submillisecond latency).
• The ability to scale across multiple data centres.
• Elasticity to support frequent capacity expansions of Amadeus server farms, which are needed to handle traffic growth.
• Delivery of seamless topology changes and data persistence to support a very write-heavy environment.

For Couchbase the partnership will deliver first-hand feedback on its products from an expert user group, allowing it to better understand customer requirements for large scale and heavy throughput developments.