One of the world’s largest online travel companies moves to AWS to achieve greater resiliency, cost savings, and agility

SEATTLE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 29, 2017-- Today, Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com company (NASDAQ: AMZN), announced that Expedia, Inc. (NASDAQ: EXPE), a global online travel company, has gone all-in on AWS and is standardizing on AWS machine learning technologies to enhance travelers’ booking experiences across its brands, including Expedia.com, Hotels.com, Expedia Affiliate Network (EAN), HomeAway, Egencia, and others. As part of a corporate-wide initiative to focus its engineering teams on innovation rather than hardware procurement and datacenter management, Expedia continues to move its 20 years’ worth of core-business workloads, digital properties, mobile applications, and legacy platforms largely from owned datacenters to AWS and will migrate several databases from Microsoft SQL Server and Oracle to Amazon Aurora as part of that process. The travel industry giant chose AWS for its highly scalable infrastructure, unmatched breadth of cloud services, and proven operational expertise.

In 2013, Expedia started leveraging AWS to speed up various large-scale projects, a move that set the stage for its future marketing agreements and, eventually, acquisitions. Expedia could not have integrated and completed one of its first acquisitions in just 91 working days without leveraging AWS for capacity and traffic management. In the last couple of years, Expedia accelerated its cloud migration efforts to move the vast majority of its workloads to AWS. Expedia used AWS’s industry-leading services to build a scalable platform for faster application deployment and has been able to launch more than 4,000 cloud applications with a release velocity of 2,000 deployments a day, on average. In addition, the data science teams for Expedia Worldwide Engineering and Hotels.com are using AWS machine learning services to deploy a variety of modules that add intelligent capabilities to processes such as bidding on search engine marketing, providing post-booking recommendations to travelers, and matching great hotels with great prices for each booked trip.

“We began our cloud journey on AWS with development and test workloads, and experienced so much success that we chose to make an all-in commitment to move our global brands, their websites and digital properties, analytics, mobile applications, and business-critical workloads to AWS,” said Tony Donohoe, Chief Technology Officer at Brand Expedia Group. “We have been able to build new applications and reengineer legacy platforms for optimal performance in the cloud. Before running analytics workloads on AWS, it took us three hours to analyze five days of performance metrics. Now we can analyze seven days of data in 30 seconds – that’s 360 times faster. With this kind of speed, we can quickly gain insights and drive the innovations that our customers expect as they interact with our brands around the world.”

“The travel industry understands that it needs to continually transform consumer experiences to remain competitive and keep their customers engaged,” said Mike Clayville, Vice President, Worldwide Commercial Sales at AWS. “With its strong presence in the market, Expedia clearly understands this. In choosing to go all-in on AWS, the cloud with the broadest and deepest functionality, they are building a culture of inventors who are focused on uncovering new ways to delight travelers that will benefit Expedia well into the future.”

About Amazon Web Services

For more than 11 years, Amazon Web Services has been the world’s most comprehensive and broadly adopted cloud platform. AWS offers over 100 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence (AI), Internet of Things (IoT), mobile, security, hybrid, and application development, deployment, and management from 44 Availability Zones (AZs) across 16 geographic regions in the U.S., Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, Germany, India, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and the UK. AWS services are trusted by millions of active customers around the world—including the fastest-growing startups, largest enterprises, and leading government agencies—to power their infrastructure, make them more agile, and lower costs. To learn more about AWS, visit https://aws.amazon.com.

About Amazon

Amazon is guided by four principles: customer obsession rather than competitor focus, passion for invention, commitment to operational excellence, and long-term thinking. Customer reviews, 1-Click shopping, personalized recommendations, Prime, Fulfillment by Amazon, AWS, Kindle Direct Publishing, Kindle, Fire tablets, Fire TV, Amazon Echo, and Alexa are some of the products and services pioneered by Amazon. For more information, visit www.amazon.com/about and follow @AmazonNews.

About Expedia

Expedia, Inc. is the world's largest online travel company, with an extensive brand portfolio that includes leading online travel brands, such as:

  • Expedia.com®, a leading full-service online travel brand with localized sites in 33 countries
  • Hotels.com®, a leading global lodging expert operating 89 localized websites in 41 languages with its award winning Hotels.com® Rewards loyalty program
  • Expedia® Affiliate Network (EAN), a global B2B brand that powers the hotel business of hundreds of leading airlines, travel agencies, loyalty and corporate travel companies plus several top consumer brands through its API and template solutions
  • trivago®, a leading online hotel search platform with sites in 55 countries worldwide
  • HomeAway®, a global online marketplace for the vacation rental industry, which also includes the VRBO®, VacationRentals.com® and BedandBreakfast.com® brands, among others
  • Egencia®, a leading corporate travel management company
  • Orbitz® and CheapTickets®, leading U.S. travel websites, as well as ebookers®, a full-service travel brand with websites in seven European countries
  • Travelocity®, a leading online travel brand in the U.S. and Canada delivering customer service when and where our customers need it with the Customer First Guarantee
  • Hotwire®, inspiring spontaneous travel through Hot Rate® deals
  • Wotif Group, a leading portfolio of travel brands including Wotif.com®, Wotif.co.nz, lastminute.com.au®, lastminute.co.nz and travel.com.au®
  • Expedia® Media Solutions, the advertising sales division of Expedia, Inc. that builds creative media partnerships and enables brand advertisers to target a highly-qualified audience of travel consumers
  • CarRentals.com™, a premier online car rental booking company with localized sites in 13 countries
  • Classic Vacations®, a top luxury travel specialist
  • Expedia Local Expert®, a provider of online and in-market concierge services, activities, experiences and ground transportation in over a thousand destinations worldwide
  • Expedia® CruiseShipCenters®, a provider of exceptional value and expert advice for travelers booking cruises and vacations through its network of over 235 retail travel agency franchises across North America
  • SilverRail Technologies, Inc., a global rail retail and distribution platform connecting rail carriers and suppliers to both online and offline travel distributors

For corporate and industry news and views, visit www.expediainc.com.

 


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Source: Amazon Web Services, Inc.

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