Newsmaker: IBM Exec Joins Amadeus

Amadeus last month unveiled plans to develop a centralized Chicago-based operation to build its presence in the Americas. Executive vice president of the multinational customer group of the Americas Dwayne Ingram since June has been leading the effort from the company's IT center in suburban Chicago, where it supports United Airlines' rollout of the Amadeus Altea IT platform.

Ingram joined Amadeus after 20 years at IBM, most recently leading IBM's application services business in the Americas in its Global Services division. Ingram also previously held executive roles in IBM's travel and transportation business process outsourcing and consulting group. He now reports to Amadeus multinational customer group vice president Gillian Gibson and Amadeus North America president and CEO Kay Urban.

Since taking on the role, Ingram has mustered a team of both internal and external personnel, including sales professionals from Amadeus' Madrid headquarters and Middle East regional office and software developers from its office in Nice, France.

Amadeus is undergoing a technological "cultural shift," said Ingram, as it moves from proprietary technology to collaborative, open systems with service-oriented architectures that can serve as the foundation for components in travel management company or airline technology portfolios.

Part of the company's "general contractor" approach, as Ingram called it, is to work more openly with technology developers, competitors and clients' IT teams. "If a client is interested in building a technology that fills a gap in the marketplace anywhere along the supply chain, we are open to launch customers and building systems where they will be the first of many," he said, "as long as we are building the building blocks along the community model with the idea that they are first out of the gate."

Although the move to open systems began in 1997, the current philosophical change is the culmination of more than five years of aggressive development that cost hundreds of millions of dollars and is scheduled for completion in 2011. According to Gibson, the core technology infrastructure is "about three-quarters of the way through. Once it's completed, there are infinite uses for the technology."

"This is part of the corporate strategy," Ingram said. "This is about making the Americas business an important part of our future, our growth strategy and this cultural shift."