American Airlines (AA) is moving a number of its consumer-facing functions, including its brand.com, onto the IBM Cloud.
A strategic partnership was announced late last year, and today's release confirms which functions will be migrated.
As well as aa.com, its consumer facing app and airport check-in kiosks around the world will migrate to the cloud, as will some of its cargo-related and back-office functions.
AA claims that the move to the cloud will help it improve the passenger experience by aligning more effectively the systems running website, app and check-in kiosks.
Examples of what the cloud hosting can offer customers includes giving passengers two or three options if their flight is cancelled or delayed, rather than the current system where American automatically books the next flight. Schedule changes are instantly delivered to aa.com, kiosks and mobile applications.
American added that it will also be able to streamline these three consumer-facing functions and be more consistent across the channels.
Behind the scenes, IBM and American are working to establish "a cloud-native architecture" for the functions which are being migrated.
Daniel Henry, AA’s vice president for customer technology and enterprise architecture said:
"We wanted to ensure our cloud partner would be a champion of Cloud Foundry and open-source technologies, so we don’t get locked down by proprietary solutions.”