As it embarks on a digital transformation journey, Air India SATS Airport Services (AISATS) now hosts its mission-critical applications on the IBM Cloud after its successful SAP to cloud migration.
A joint venture between Air India Limited and Singapore Airport Terminal Services (SATS Limited), AISATS is known for offering comprehensive solutions to its customer airlines at airports across India including Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mangalore and Trivandrum.
AISATS’ end-to-end services such as managing diverter flights, cargo handling for general and perishable items, transshipment, passenger and baggage handling, and flight operations generate massive data flowing in from different systems.
Before finally deciding to fully embrace SAP modernisation by choosing a cloud service provider, AISATS failed to process data swiftly and extract useful business insights as it did not have analytics capabilities to do so.
In an interview, Snehashis Ghosh, Head of Technology at AISATS, expounds on the operations’ digital overhaul and their decision to tap IBM:
“We embarked on our digital transformation journey with a singular belief of enhancing our technology offerings, and that’s why we chose IBM as our partner. IBM, with its IT stewardship and legacy, is well-positioned to help us transform our business.”
Ghosh remarks:
“With IBM Cloud, an active-passive cloud environment and a micro-service have been enabled at our Mumbai and Bengaluru locations. We have also subscribed to their endpoints system for our corporate headquarters in Mumbai and business operating locations of Bengaluru, Delhi, Hyderabad, Mangalore and Thiruvananthapuram.”
Successful SAP to Cloud Migration using IBM
AISATS’ focus on taking advantage of potential digital transformation opportunities drove its decision to maximise the value of data contained within its SAP applications.
Lingraju Sawkar, General Manager, Global Technology Services at IBM India/South Asia, expresses his excitement about the partnership. He says AISATS’ move to migrate their SAP applications to IBM Cloud will ‘bring in agility and scalability in the most secure environment’ for their operations.
Sawkar adds:
“Further, we are helping them in their hybrid cloud journey by managing their disaster recovery and providing governance and compliance services for data for better control over their infrastructure.”
IBM’s ability to lift and shift SAP workloads enabled AISATS to protect its current investments while also integrating seamlessly with on-premise. Leveraging technology innovation such as SAP HANA also provided the performance needed.
Integration Tackles Operability Challenges
Migrating business-critical SAP workloads to cloud aims to help AISATS take advantage of hardware flexibility and approach technology-related difficulties with ease.
The partnership with IBM played a crucial role in advancing AISATS’ tech solution offerings. AISATS managed to address its challenges in hardware requirements, maintain its recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO), and control its overall technology-related risks.
When asked about the added benefits of the integration, Ghosh mentions:
“Further, the one-click solution offered by IBM has helped to improve our user-support management. IBM has even helped in deepening our technical expertise and achieving customer success across our locations.”
Soon after IBM Cloud’s implementation, AISATS began offering an improved version of their service for its customers while simultaneously creating sustainable business conditions for its company. There has also been a significant reduction in the time cycle for AISATS’ service delivery.
To gain a better understanding of its systems across different locations, AISATS has also applied IBM’s AI expertise with Cognos. The stack includes SAP HANA, IBM’s interprocess communication, and IBM Tivoli to name a few.
Additionally, AISATS also made use of IBM’s unified security intelligence platform QRadar to get risk-based information to critical threats across a hybrid cloud and help the business establish real-time monitoring.
Ghosh concludes:
“IBM cloud is far more secure and provides high-visibility on all the running stack.”
