IndiGo Airlines is optimizing flight operations, streamlining maintenance processes, and providing personalized services to passengers by leveraging Red Hat’s AI- integrated solutions. This partnership exemplifies how AI can revolutionize traditional industries, making them more agile and responsive to market demands. To brief more about the collaboration and the benefits, Viju Chakarapany, Vice President & Head of Commercial Sales (APAC/JAPAN/Greater China), Red Hat and Neetan Chopra, Chief Digital and Information Officer, IndiGo interacted with Vishal Kashyap, Managing Editor, Aviation World. Here are the excerpts of the discussion:

Q: How the collaboration between Red Hat and IndiGo shaped up? Viju Chakarapany: Everything that we looked at, the relationship started about a year ago on the terms of how this would help the business. We spoke about modernizing the application and one of the classic is Skyplus, the application that we have for direct interaction with the customer. How do we make sure that we move it away from legacy technologies into modern technologies, so that changes can be made faster, features can be implemented quickly, scale achieved through the cloud and on-premise whenever required. Because, you don’t know when the scale will come sometimes as some of it is predictable, some of it is not, right?Number of people will come to the site so that the customer experience at the end of the day becomes great. Likewise, opening up the APIs and all that, how will that help the developers, not just within IndiGo to be able to see each other’s APIs and see how we can integrate and make it better and cut off the silos, but also outside, right? Be it a young developer who’s developing something to integrate with IndiGo’s platform. They can do that very easily now, right? How do they do that? So that we can get a lot more open with regards to, you know,Working on newer technologies or newer applications that pretty much uses some of the technology that we have co-created In IndiGo. Automation is extremely exciting because the more you automate, the more time you have to innovate.

Q: What is the contribution of Red Hat’s OpenShift and integration solutions to IndiGo’s transformation?

Neetan Chopra: There are two-three components of Red Hat that we use. One is to look at application modernization. For example, when you have to modernize your website and app, the digital channels, you need to be able to break them into small components, and then host it within what we call container networks. So, the ability to break up our application into micro services, and run those micro services is one of the components we are using of Red Hat.

The other area is once you kind of modernize your app, you need to make sure you are beaming those integration and the API part. So, for this we are using a Red Hat component. Around 160 applications or integration footprints were running on our on-premise application that we had to shift it to the cloud. So, the whole cloud environment, along with Microsoft and Red Hat, that’s another component we are using. From a technology perspective, micro services breaking up into small parts, integration, APIs, and cloud is broadly where we are using reduced software.

What is in the works, is this whole, what we call a zero-touch ops or invisible ops, which is the ability to run infrastructure in a software way. So, we are starting to use, one of Red Hat’s programs or kind of products called Ansible Automation Platform. One can now write on Ansible to boot up infrastructure and configure it. So, we are trying to move in that direction as well.

Q: What is exactly the role of Open API platform for integration and collaboration?

Viju Chakarapany: Open API is extremely important, especially when you don’t want to reinvent the wheel. There are components that have already been done by other players and what not. Let me give you an example, this is nothing to do with IndiGo, right? One of the things that we do in Singapore today is the banks are integrating their login credentials .That’s because they don’t have to reinvent it and do it by themselves.

They can just be dependent on someone who’s already done it, who is the authority on making sure that it’s the right person and the right login, and you are getting the right information from that person so that they can do what they need to do in terms of logging them into secure systems, getting an account set up very quickly without needing to ask all this information, because that’s all going to be coming from a so-called third party. So this way of integrating information so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel is extremely important. That’s why APIs became so big.Everybody was just starting to use, just do components so that you can integrate together with each one of them. I think similarly in Indigo’s case was the same.

One is internal focused, whereby you don’t have to reinvent the wheel in terms of understanding what exactly is in there. The information goes in and it comes out. You don’t have to know what’s inside there.

That’s pretty much using the API, and that makes it faster for developers, a lot quicker for them to implement their solutions. It also helps external organizations who are trying to collaborate with IndiGo. If you go today and you look at any of the airline’s websites, you’ll see that it’s kind of integrated pretty well. The integration behind happens because they’ve got open APIs, they’re exchanging that. And that’s how this whole logic, how do we make this a lot quicker open up. And that’s the logic behind open APIs, right

Neetan Chopra: I think one is from a customer perspective, it’s a bit of a technology which is hidden below the wraps, but what does it deliver? I think it delivers speed of response. New features, new innovations, new developments, a sky being launched, soup to nuts in 100 days. So, one is response times to customer needs.
Second, customers experience the whole travel ecosystem. They book on us, they experience the airport, ground handling, security. So ability to integrate the ecosystem improves as well. Response time to customer needs and the ecosystem management.

Q: With growing number of fleets, more technology integration would be required. So with Red hat how IndiGo has shaped up its upcoming requirements?

Neetan Chopra: IndiGo has great growth plans and we’ve got a huge kind of journey ahead of us. From a technology perspective, we’ve laid the foundations with Red Hat, the job is not yet done. I see these four to five areas that we need to continue to focus on:
I: Application Modernization ii: Integration iii: APIs iv: Talent (Lab 37) vi: Infrastructure

In a month’s time, one can see the physical manifestation of the lab, although the work in the lab is always, you know, not visible. We are also collaborating with Red Hat on the Lab 37 front, because experimentation and innovation are intrinsic to the growth of IndiGo.

We are trying to make our infrastructure, shifting it to the cloud, but making everything automated. We have probably achieved some midway progress on these, but given our scale and our ambitions, these just need to keep going. And eventually, they all lead to benefit for our customers.

The other important aspect is disruption with co-innovation and AI is definitely part of it, because we are getting into that in a big way. We are taking the latest AI technologies that we have and making it better. We have started modernizing the applications with the intention of disrupting some of the market in the way they do things, so that the customer is benefited at the end of the day.