"For us, stability and scalability are the key aspects of open source platforms"

'Open source is at the heart of what we do.' - this is what Amadeus, a global technology provider for the travel industry, says on its website. Rahul Chopra and Vaishali Yadav of EFY Group recently interacted with Mani Ganeshan, global head of engineering, travel distribution and centre head at Amadeus Labs, to understand why open source is important for the company, and what has been done to move in this direction. Ganeshan also talked about the hiring trends and how emerging technologies have led to interesting use cases in the travel industry. Read on to know more...

- Rahul Chopra and Vaishali Yadav

Q. Could you briefly give some background about Amadeus and its presence in India?

A. Amadeus is the world’s largest technology provider for the travel industry. We’re a 37-year-old company, headquartered in Madrid and have more than 19,000 employees working in various offices worldwide. We’ve developed the technology on which the travel industry transacts its business, be it the sale of tickets for airlines, room nights, car rentals, and so on. We have a vast network of travel agencies on our platform.

Further, we facilitate the inventory being sold to travellers like you and me. And this is one of our largest verticals. We have a second vertical made up of IT business for airlines, hotel chains, car rental companies, and so on. We also play in adjacent businesses like payments for the travel industry, and the IT for airports. So, Amadeus has the solutions for almost everything related to the travel life cycle and its several stages.

The 11-year-old Bengaluru centre is our second largest engineering and R&D centre worldwide. Here, we have over 3000 engineers innovating on several aspects of our platform. And so, we cater to solutions not only for the global travel ecosystem but also act as the engineering hub for the APAC region, based in India.

Q. I want to understand how, despite several startups coming in, Amadeus has been able to survive and thrive in the terminals of almost all travel agents.