INDUSTRY WATCH
C
an you describe recent
ICT project initiatives at
Gulf Air and how they
have better served as a business
purpose?
Gulf Air opted to implement private
cloud services that are an evolution of
new generation data centres based
on virtualisation technology and using
private IP network. The infrastructure and
computing resources are managed by the
Gulf Air IT-Department and not shared.
This resulted in major agility transformation
in data centre automation while optimising
and minimising data centre operations cost
rapidly and enhanced/increased IT service
availability to achieve Gulf Air’s key business
objectives.
Gulf Air pioneered by being first
implementer in virtualising physical
servers in this region, storage and network
components that provided huge scalability
for the services to be published over the
private cloud. Those implementations
enabled Gulf Air to deploy the services
more rapidly in contrast to non-virtualised
environment.
In order to provide efficient
communication with the external parties,
Gulf Air extended its own private cloud
to other parties’ cloud to create a hybrid
cloud, which combines advantages of
scalability and cost-effectiveness of public
clouds and security of private cloud.
Gulf Air has managed to leverage its
cloud to implement a unique Big Data
solution that utilises both English and
Arabic languages with different dialects.
The solution is based on an open-source
platform for Big Data which monitors
the state of the market and Gulf Air’s
competitors. This product depends on the
huge amount of data being created on
the social media (especially Twitter), where
the Big Data solution extracts the relevant
data and performs text mining to find the
required information and patterns/trends.
The Gulf Air team had to educate
themselves with the principles of text
mining and how to define the right logic
and keywords to make conclusion and
spot trends in huge amount of data to
arrive to information about the state of
www.intelligentcio.com
“IN ORDER TO
PROVIDE EFFICIENT
COMMUNICATION WITH
THE EXTERNAL PARTIES,
GULF AIR EXTENDED ITS
OWN PRIVATE CLOUD
TO OTHER PARTIES’
CLOUD TO CREATE A
HYBRID CLOUD, WHICH
COMBINES ADVANTAGES
OF SCALABILITY AND
COST-EFFECTIVENESS
OF PUBLIC CLOUDS AND
SECURITY OF PRIVATE
CLOUD.”
the market, actions and promotions of
competitors and how to sense the impact
on the business. Gulf Air implemented
the concept of Massive Parallel Processing
(MPP) of the Big Data in order to enable
the product to handle huge amounts
of data by processing them on different
nodes of the Big Data infrastructure on the
same time.
Gulf Air also recognised the power of
mobility and the potential of using
tablets and smartphones as an integral
part of its operations. One of the recent
achievements includes ElectronicFlight-Bag (EFB) and Cabin Crew Tablet
applications; these applications aim at
improving operations and efficiency of
flights by replacing heavy paper-based
manuals/material (time-consuming/
costly to update/maintain) with electronic
format, which reduced costs of paperbased materials, reduced weight on
aircrafts (fuel saving), optimized payloads
and reduced engine wear and tear.
Gulf Air’s cloud also enabled the
organisation to extend its business
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