Star Alliance expands partnership with TCS

Global airline alliance Star Alliance has expanded its partnership with Mumbai based information technology (IT) services company Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

Under the partnership, TCS will provide predictive and real-time business analytics to help Star Alliance improve its customers’ overall experience and accelerate its digital transformation journey.

Established in 1997, Star Alliance includes five airlines -- Air Canada, Lufthansa, Scandinavian Airlines, THAI and United.

TCS’ has worked with Star Alliance for over 15 years and across multiple geographies, the company said in a statement.

The IT services giant will deploy AWS technology around data analytics, business intelligence and machine learning to improve Star Alliance’s business performance and ability to innovate at scale. The deployment is expected to power the Frankfurt, Germany-headquartered company with real-time predictive capabilities and faster, more informed decision-making. 

 “With TCS, we look forward to accelerating the development of new enterprise applications and customer features and deploying machine learning models, to allow us to introduce new services that reimagine the global travel experience for the millions of airline customers we serve across the world,” Jeffrey Goh, CEO, Star Alliance, said. 

Recently, TCS completed a large-scale cloud migration to help the company improve speed to market, enhance customer experience during interline travels, and reduce the number of third country operators involved for member carriers. According to the company, it provided the alliance a complete virtual oversight of its organization and a scalable infrastructure.

“Having transformed Star Alliance’s IT with our cloud-first strategy using AWS, we are now helping them unlock further value by harnessing capabilities around advanced analytics and machine learning to deliver higher levels of personalization and superior customer experiences,” said Arun Pradeep, head, travel, transportation and hospitality, Europe, TCS.

India’s largest software exporter, TCS, reported a 7% decrease in quarterly profit for the second quarter of financial year 2020-21. Its net profit fell to Rs 7,475 crore from Rs 8,042 crore a year ago. Its Q2 revenue, meanwhile, rose about 3% to Rs 40,135 crore.

The company also announced the restoration of salary hikes from October 1, as well as a Rs 16,000 crore share buyback for its investors.