ARMONK, N.Y., March 10, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- IBM (NYSE: IBM) and EGYPTAIR Tourism and Duty Free Co. announced today a new agreement in which the airline will leverage IBM Cloud to scale and modernize EGYPTAIR Duty Free back-end operations and host its SAP Travel Retail System.  By adopting IBM Cloud, EGYPTAIR will also leverage IBM Watson Assistant to create an AI virtual agent to help transform their travelers' shopping experience.

With the Covid-19 pandemic, the airlines industry started to look for new technologies to reinvent their services and unlock an array of new experiences for their customers. EGYPTAIR Duty Free selected IBM as its technology provider for cloud architecture.

With a hybrid cloud approach from IBM, EGYPTAIR Duty Free will migrate its ERP workload to IBM Cloud while staying connected and fully integrated with the Frequent-Flyer Program of EGYPTAIR Airlines and Star Alliance companies to provide shopping services from EGYPTAIR's duty free outlets and help attract new customers. For example, EGYPTAIR Duty Free customers will make all payment transactions through a secured point of sale that is part of IBM Cloud infrastructure.

With IBM Cloud, EGYPTAIR can leverage IBM's industry-leading security capabilities, which can include confidential computing and encryption capabilities backed by the highest level of security certification commercially available¹. This gives enterprises the ability to retain control of their own encryption keys so IBM clients are the only ones who can control access to their data.

As part of this engagement, IBM will provide technology and industry expertise to enhance the digital services for EGYPTAIR Duty Free by using IBM Watson Assistant, running on IBM Cloud.  The AI virtual agent will be designed to provide EGYPTAIR Duty Free customers with a differentiated shopping experience, enabling them to do online shopping through the Duty Free website including order placement, payment and delivery inside the plane, thus providing a smooth retail experience.

"The new technology will help us to reinvent our services and unlock an array of new choices for our customers," said Mr. Reda Metwally Chairman and CEO, EGYPTAIR Duty Free "With IBM and SAP technology, we will modernize our operations through the supply chain to meet the evolving needs of our customers and suppliers."

"In choosing a hybrid cloud approach and migrating to IBM Cloud, EGYPTAIR can provide its customers with a secured and enhanced retail experience. IBM has decades of experience driving transformation within the travel industry, and looks forward to helping EGYPTAIR modernize their operations to meet the needs of today's customer," said Harish Grama, General Manager, IBM Cloud.

This collaboration comes within the framework of EGYPTAIR's strategy in line with Egypt's digital transformation roadmap to create an easy, digitized and personalized customers' experiences.

IBM has a long history of working with the airlines industry as well as with leading travel and transportation companies around the world. For decades, IBM has collaborated with EGYPTAIR to host core applications on both IBM hardware and software.

About IBM

For more information, please visit https://www.ibm.com/eg-en/cloud/public 

^{1 - Based on IBM Hyper Protect Crypto Service, the only service in the industry built on FIPS 140-2 Level 4-certified hardware.}

Contact:

Suzanne Cross
IBM Communications
suzanne.cross@us.ibm.com

SOURCE IBM