Amadeus, a processor of travel transactions, is looking to create up to 50 IT jobs worldwide over the next year as it plans to boost its use of automation.
The company, which operates the largest data centre in Europe for the travel industry, said the bulk of these jobs will be in automation and cloud.
Wolfgang Krips, EVP of Global Operations at Amadeus, told CBR: "We’re talking about in the order of 30 to 50 something.
"This is the long-term vision for the software defined data centre, which is that all the service provisioning is almost fully automated, for example, like what you’re seeing with Amazon.
"We want to drive this one step further where in the future our internal business people can configure the services and there’s nobody in global operations doing a thing. It’s all basically constructed out of a bill of maturity and automatically provided."
The company, founded in 1987, currently employs 10,000 people across central sites in Madrid, Nice and Erding, as well as 71 local Amadeus Commercial organisations worldwide.
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The data centre in Erding, just outside Munich, is responsible for keeping the operational processes of airlines, such as check-in, boarding and the load plans for the aircraft available at all times.
Krips said: "We need to branch out our skills in automation. We also need knowledge in cloud technologies and virtualisation, and that’s what we’re currently bringing in and we’re educating our people to get that.
"It’s not that we don’t have the knowledge but we need to have more. We’re currently deploying these technologies here because even if we don’t use the external cloud providers, we need the technology for us to stay competitive.
"The technologies that the cloud providers are using allow you to operate in a data centre in a very efficient way."
He adds there needs to be a balance between having a highly skilled team who can solve complex issues that arise when operating a data centre along with the procedures required needed to repeatedly get high quality results.
"If you have humans in the process, it slows down the process. So what we’re trying to do is take the people out and say look where you have the knowledge is in understanding the process.
"So why don’t you guys design, monitor and run the automation, and let’s do the volume work by automation because it’s not much fun configuring network cards one after the other."
