Airlines, travel agencies and TMCs to all benefit from improvement in online responses of up to five times previous speeds, leading to increased revenues and a cutting-edge user experience

In conjunction, Amadeus is to become an official re-seller of Akamai Web Application Accelerator solutions worldwide

Madrid, Spain, 13th June 2012: Amadeus, a leading travel technology partner and transaction processor for the global travel and tourism industry, today announces it has signed a global partnership agreement with Akamai, the leading cloud platform for helping enterprises provide secure, high-performing user experiences on any device, anywhere, 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.

Denis Lacroix, Vice President of Product Development, Sales and e-Commerce Platforms, Amadeus commented: “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.”

He continues: “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”.

“For global companies such as Amadeus, the cloud is fast becoming the application delivery channel of choice for both business to consumer and business to business services,” explained Willie M. Tejada, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Cloud Division, Akamai. “Our solutions are designed to provide an exemplary end user experience independent of device or location. This is critical to overall service adoption and ultimate customer satisfaction.”

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 per cent drop in customer satisfaction and subsequently a seven per cent fall in conversion rates.

The massively distributed Akamai Intelligent Platform, which delivers as much as 30 percent of global Web traffic on any given day, is designed to transform the chaos of the Internet into a predictable, scalable, and secure platform for business. Akamai provides the security, scalability, and visibility customers require to more easily and cost-effectively move mission-critical applications to the cloud. Amadeus powers more than 260 websites for over 100 airlines in more than 110 countries around the world.