When the COVID-19 pandemic began, air travel came to a halt. For Delta Air Lines, one of the world’s oldest airlines in operation, two things became clear. One, the airline needed to respond to the economic realities of the time. And two, once the pandemic came to an end it would need to quickly get new, premium customer experiences off the ground.
Both directions needed the support of more than 90,000 front line employees. And all of them needed different tools and insights to be able to go the extra mile for Delta’s valued customers. Accomplishing that meant that a transformation was required to enable technology solutions to be delivered faster, and in a more secure, reliable and scalable way.
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To co-pilot this journey, Delta turned to IBM. Using the IBM Garage™ Methodology, IBM Consulting™ experts worked side-by-side with Delta to plan out the migration that would move most of the airline’s distributed workloads to the hybrid cloud. With that, Delta’s cloud migration initiative was airborne.
Moving hundreds of workloads to the cloud is just the beginning. By modernizing operations with the open hybrid cloud architecture built on Red Hat® OpenShift® Service on AWS (ROSA), Delta can now deploy anywhere and take a consistent, standards-based approach to development, security and operations across clouds. This will be the key to clearing the runway to greater scale and more personalized customer experiences.
Delta’s cloud migration is still ongoing - hundreds of applications have been migrated to the cloud and many team members are adopting new agile ways of working with IBM’s help. Delta and its customers are already reaping some of the rewards. For instance, building on the cloud foundation with ROSA allowed Delta to quickly launch free in-flight Wi-Fi on more than 680 planes and start to provide more personalized services on-board.
Looking ahead, Delta’s cloud transformation initiative aims to increase employee engagement, productivity, speed to market and cost efficiencies by between 25%–30%. And with the IBM team, Delta’s laying the groundwork that will help it be ready to weather the ups and downs of a turbulent industry while continuing to deliver the first-class customer experience and operational excellence for which it is known.
Headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia, Delta (link resides outside of ibm.com) is a leading global airline. More than 90,000 people at Delta lead the way in delivering a world-class customer experience on over 4,000 daily flights to more than 280 destinations on six continents.
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