Mir H Ali

Flight Centre Travel Group is a large retail travel agency in Australia. It was founded in 1982 and is headquartered in Brisbane, Australia. With an active user base of 12,000 users spread across Australia and New Zealand, they required a scalable, stable, and high-performance platform for the organization.

Sabre Red Workspace, a state-of-the-art, comprehensive travel agency solution, was the product of choice.

I managed this project from concept to completion and delivered this on time and under budget. This project navigated uncharted waters with a Citrix-based solution out of AWS Singapore. With many technical and logistical challenges during the deployment of the solution, we had to come up with very creative workarounds and ingenious solutions to make this happen.

This 10-year contract at an estimated gross revenue of $1 billion per year is worth 10 billion dollars overall.

The project involved getting key stakeholder commitment across multiple business lines and establishing trust for handing off production support for multi-million dollar per day systems. Most of these systems service global airline and hotel customers and have a contractual uptime commitment with heavy penalties. I had to work with each country's production support team to establish a process and provided complete transparency, control, and escalation mechanism to the satisfaction of all key stakeholders.

Over 14 months, we established the Global Operations Control Center, hired 140 support professionals, and launched the operations with zero downtime or impact on production.

This two year project involved migrating 2,000+ applications to AWS to allow 7,800 servers to be decommissioned. Each migrating application had to be carefully evaluated and planned with intricate application and infrastructure dependencies, connectivity needs, and traffic volume restrictions.

The planning phase involved multiple deep-dive sessions with architects to understand dependencies and design the migration plan. Legacy applications had to be modernized as part of the cloud onboarding process and within the project timelines.