Celebrating five years of the Amadeus-Microsoft strategic partnership
Amadeus Chief Technology Officer, Sylvain Roy, speaks to Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud + AI Group, Microsoft
The strategic partnership between travel technology leader Amadeus and cloud innovator Microsoft is celebrating its fifth anniversary.
Five years ago, Amadeus and Microsoft set out to transform the technology foundations of the travel industry. Today, the partnership extends far beyond cloud migration, enabling innovation in areas such as AI, traveler experiences, operational efficiency, and ecosystem collaboration.
Amadeus Chief Technology Officer Sylvain Roy and Scott Guthrie, Executive Vice President, Cloud + AI Group, reflect on the partnership's evolution, the impact of cloud and AI, and what's ahead for the travel industry.
Scott Guthrie: When you look back over the last five years of the partnership between Amadeus and Microsoft, what are the most tangible outcomes you've seen?
Sylvain Roy: While one of the most obvious outcomes is that Amadeus now runs on the cloud, this is a profound change for our business.
Today, more than 400 applications and 100% of the workloads previously hosted at our data centers have now moved to Microsoft Azure. This stands as one of the largest cloud transformations the travel industry has undertaken and gives us an open, modular and interoperable foundation to build the next generation of travel solutions on.
Beyond the migration itself, this transformation has enabled us to innovate faster, scale globally, and deliver greater resilience for our customers across the travel ecosystem. It has also created new opportunities for co-innovation between Amadeus and Microsoft, bringing new capabilities to market more quickly.
The partnership has gone well beyond infrastructure and delivered products customers use every day.
In airport operations, Amadeus Virtual Airport Operations Center helps multiple stakeholders coordinate from a shared digital environment.
In hospitality, Amadeus Max for Hotels uses generative AI to help hoteliers query business intelligence data more easily and act with greater confidence.
Sylvain Roy: From the perspective of Microsoft, what defines the strength of this partnership?
Scott Guthrie: What stands out most is the consistency of the relationship. One thing that's worked well is that we've stayed focused on the long-term goals of the partnership, even as priorities have evolved over time. That alignment has allowed us to tackle some of the industry's most complex technology challenges together and continue investing in innovation over the long term.
The investments Amadeus made in cloud and data created a strong foundation that positioned them to move quickly as AI capabilities matured. Moving highly complex systems to the cloud is one of the hardest things a technology company can do, and Amadeus made a long-term commitment to that journey. For Microsoft, it is a great example of a global, always-on travel system operating on Azure. Just as important is what Amadeus did with that move: it modernized the architecture, making systems more modular and resilient and creating a foundation the company can continue to build on as technology evolves.
One of the things that makes this partnership particularly distinctive is that it goes well beyond infrastructure. By combining Amadeus' travel expertise with Microsoft's cloud, data, and AI capabilities, we've been able to drive innovation across the industry and create new value for customers.
We also learned that none of this works without the right people and governance. We have strong executive sponsorship on both sides and a joint governance model that keeps decisions aligned and momentum high. Beneath that, our engineering, product and commercial teams work as one, and that day-to-day collaboration is what powers everything we have built.
Scott Guthrie: How has this transformation translated into real innovation for Amadeus?
Sylvain Roy: Moving to a cloud-native, AI-ready architecture changed how fast we can innovate. The real differentiator is what this foundation enables. Amadeus sits at the heart of the travel ecosystem, connecting suppliers, sellers and technology partners to trusted, dynamic travel data. With Microsoft, we can bring cloud and AI capabilities into that ecosystem in a secure, scalable, and practical way.
When your systems are modular and resilient and run on a global scale, you can develop, test and ship new travel solutions far faster than you could before. That speed is the real innovation story behind the migration.
Innovation is not limited to the solutions we bring to the market. Together, we are also helping transform the future of travel through joint research and thought leadership.
We have published joint studies on where travel is heading, from Mobility as a Service reshaping car rental, to agentic AI in airline operations, to how AI is bringing new efficiency to travel workflows.
Also, our joint view on the future of corporate travel technology makes the point clear. AI in corporate travel is ready to scale, but only on a strong foundation of trust, security and governance.
Sylvain Roy: Looking ahead, where do you see the biggest impact of this collaboration?
Scott Guthrie: One of the biggest shifts we're seeing is how quickly expectations are changing across the travel ecosystem. Travelers and employees can do much more on their own today, and they increasingly expect experiences that are more personalized, responsive, and connected. That creates an opportunity for companies like Amadeus to continue reinventing how they operate and serve customers. When I look ahead, there are three areas where I think we’ll see the biggest impact.
First, AI-driven experiences. What becomes really interesting is when you combine Amadeus' travel expertise and data with Microsoft’s AI capabilities. That's where I think you start to unlock entirely new experiences and operational improvements.
Second is the pace of innovation. A cloud-native architecture makes it easier to bring new capabilities to airlines, hotels and travel providers faster. That means organizations respond more quickly to changing traveler expectations and take advantage of new technologies as they emerge.
Finally, resilience and scale. As travel continues to evolve, having a secure, reliable, and scalable platform becomes even more important. For systems like this, critical resilience also needs to be designed into the application from the start so it can operate reliably in the cloud and withstand disruption. That is essential for the systems the industry depends on every day.
Just as important is what this enables across the broader travel ecosystem. Travel has always been an ecosystem business, and the greatest opportunities emerge when airlines, airports, hotels, mobility providers and technology partners can work together more seamlessly. The cloud makes it much easier to connect organizations across the travel value chain, and when you combine that with data and AI, it opens new possibilities for innovation that will shape the next generation of travel experiences and operations.
As AI becomes more deeply integrated into how work gets done, the opportunity is no longer just about technology. It's about helping people develop new skills, working in new ways, and ultimately achieving more.
Scott Guthrie: As AI changes how work gets done, what has been the human impact of this journey for Amadeus?
Sylvain Roy: This is the part of the story I am most proud of. A transformation of this size does not happen because of technology alone. It happens because of the people. Nearly 5,000 Amadeus employees around the world contributed to the cloud program, with teams across more than 30 sites working side-by-side to make it real. That is a major collective achievement, and it belongs to all of them.
The way we work changed along the way.
Moving to the cloud pushed us toward more agile and collaborative models, with engineering, product and commercial teams solving problems together rather than in silos. People developed new skills, took on new challenges and came out of it more capable than when they started.
AI is now part of that daily rhythm. We have deployed Microsoft 365 Copilot and GitHub Copilot at scale, and thousands of colleagues use them every day to save time and work differently. The value is not only speed. AI helps our people summarize information, draft content, analyze data and work more effectively, freeing them to focus on higher-value work.
So beyond modernized systems, the real result is people. This journey has raised skills, shifted mindsets, and changed how we work together across the whole company.
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