Malaysia Airlines Reaches the Cloud with Tata Consultancy Services

Industry-first full-service airline all-cloud model delivers innovation, transformation and future readiness

Kuala Lumpur | Mumbai, October 30, 2017: Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), (BSE: 532540, NSE: TCS), a leading global IT services, consulting and business solutions organisation, today announced the successful implementation of a large-scale and industry-first transformation project to migrate Malaysia Airlines’ data centre to a 100% hybrid-cloud model.

In the latest evolution of a multi-year partnership, Malaysia Airlines selected TCS to lead the airline’s largest ever IT transformation project. To better enable a competitive-edge and future readiness for the airline, TCS orchestrated the massive and complex project to migrate the airline’s core mission-critical data centre infrastructure and myriad applications to a hybrid-cloud model operating 80% on Microsoft Azure and 20% on a private cloud.

The pioneering move makes Malaysia Airlines the world’s first full-service airline to completely replace its existing data centres and adopt full-scale cloud solutions for its entire range of nearly 200 applications running mission critical commercial, operations and corporate systems.

Tan Kok Meng, Chief Information Officer at Malaysia Airlines: “We set out with an ambitious goal to digitally transform core IT operations to an as-a-service model, to achieve a quantum leap in cost savings, scalability, efficiencies, agility, and other key factors. TCS has been an integral component of our success in our shift to cloud, serving as trusted partner throughout the journey. I am proud to say that together, Malaysia Airlines and TCS have created a solution that helps position Malaysia Airlines as a leader in digital capabilities that ultimately deliver a better customer experience.”

The cloud-centric model is achieving exemplary results, including a 51% cost reduction forecast over a 5-year period from mid-2016; productivity improvements up to 80% for core applications; application delivery times accelerated from days to hours in some cases; enhanced security and compliance capability and reporting, to name a few. 

TCS Asia Pacific President Girish Ramachandran: "We are delighted to have successfully assisted our long-time partner Malaysia Airlines to develop an innovative, industry-leading cloud-first model that is helping it reinvent itself and gain an edge in the highly competitive global full-service airline sector.  This industry-first transformation not just drives improved value and enhanced operational efficiencies, but equally important, it enables Malaysia Airlines to deliver a better customer experience that results from a digitally-reimagined all-cloud IT model. 

As primary service partner, TCS collaborated with Microsoft, SAP, and numerous other vendors to ensure Malaysia Airlines’ current phase of digital evolution is seamless and cost-efficient and delivered without business disruption. The project scope included re-platforming of legacy applications for cloud compatibility and network service provisioning for large and complex airline operations. See the cloud transformation story in a single snapshot here.

The cloud transformation project is the latest evolution in the relationship between Malaysia Airlines and TCS, a relationship that has consistently grown since the first 5-year agreement was signed for IT Infrastructure services in 2010. A case study of prior work done by TCS for Malaysia Airlines datacenter operations here.