OpenText home page.
Customer stories

Travel customer storyInternational airport

Transforms IT and OT with OpenText AI Operations Management to keep 90+ million passengers moving smoothly

Travel customer story

About the international airport

Serving more than 90 million travelers annually, this airport is among the world’s busiest for international passenger traffic. It stands out as a global hub known for innovation, efficiency, and exceptional customer service.

A person holding a phone in the airport
  • Region:
    EMEA
  • Operating airlines:
    100+
  • Destinations:
    200+ across 6 continents
  • Opened:
    1960

Summary

Challenges

  • Fragmented data and lack of real-time visibility hurt response times.
  • Operational resilience and digital service reliability were lacking.
  • Stakeholders needed shared data access for unified decisions.

Solution

  • Elevate IT operations with an AI operations management platform.
  • Bridge the gap between IT and OT monitoring.
  • Model end-to-end services for seamless travel.

Results

  • Prevented 30% of incidents with proactive monitoring
  • Aligned IT operations with business needs
  • Strengthened customer focus through IT excellence

Challenges

  • Critical data was spread across multiple platforms, making it hard to coordinate stakeholder communication or respond to congestion in real time
  • Unstable systems and service outages were getting in the way of delivering world-class passenger experiences

Welcoming 90+ million passengers in 2024, this international airport isn't just one of the world's busiest—it's also one of the most digitally advanced. Since opening in 1960, the airport has expanded dramatically, adding new runways, terminals, and concourses to accommodate growing air traffic.

Laying the digital foundation for this growth hasn’t been easy. With stakeholders ranging from airlines to police, customs, and service providers, communication is complex. Everyone needs access to the same data for coordinated decision-making.

"Much of our data was siloed across multiple systems, and ensuring accuracy, particularly for tracking passenger flows and processing times, was a real challenge," an airport IT service management lead said. "Staff often lacked real-time insights or predictive tools to manage queues, staffing, and congestion proactively."

Delivering a world-class customer experience is a top priority, requiring real-time passenger feedback and journey details at critical touchpoints like check-in, immigration, and boarding. But existing methods lacked immediacy and detail, relying heavily on manual input that created delays and inefficiencies.

Beyond the passenger experience, the IT team knew that high service availability and system stability were essential for seamless digital operations. They aimed to improve operational resilience, visibility, and overall service quality to support the airport’s ambitious growth.

Much of our data was siloed across multiple systems, and ensuring accuracy, particularly for tracking passenger flows and processing times, was a real challenge. Staff often lacked real-time insights or predictive tools to manage queues, staffing, and congestion proactively.

IT Service Management Lead

Solution

With OpenText™ AI Operations Management and OpenText™ Universal Discovery and CMDB, the airport modernized IT/OT operations—gaining full visibility, proactive issue detection, and real-time service modeling for resilient operations and smooth experiences.

Products deployed

Elevate IT operations with an AI operations management platform

As part of a broad service management initiative, the airport partnered with a technology provider to extend its monitoring capabilities using the latest version of their IT operations management suite. A key component of the suite, OpenText AI Operations Management, provides centralized, intelligent monitoring and management across complex IT environments. It enhances observability, reduces alert noise, predicts problems, and helps maintain uptime.

OpenText AI Operations Management is integrated with OpenText Universal Discovery and CMDB, which builds and maintains a real-time model of the IT landscape. This model enables better decision-making, faster troubleshooting, and improved service management by showing how infrastructure, applications, and services connect.

Although already in place, the provider’s solutions were used only in isolated pockets of the infrastructure. “Once we upgraded to the latest version,” the IT lead said, “the provider's team helped us transform an underutilized toolset into a business-critical solution that is central to our IT operations.”

Bridge the gap between IT and OT monitoring

The airport’s ecosystem includes both IT and OT (operational technology) systems. While traditional IT assets, such as networks, servers, and databases, were already monitored, critical OT systems like CCTV and baggage handling systems (BHS) were not. This posed a risk to operational continuity and stakeholder satisfaction.

With the new solutions, visibility now spans both IT and OT environments. “For the first time, we extended monitoring to the OT side, including CCTV and BHS. This has added enormous value for our stakeholders by proactively protecting critical infrastructure,” the IT lead said. “We also enhanced our [OpenText] Universal Discovery and CMDB to create a technology dependency matrix directly linking network components to stakeholder services.”

OpenText AI Operations Management now generates alerts when service thresholds are exceeded, enabling proactive detection and strengthening operational resilience.

Model end-to-end services for seamless travel

Leveraging the technology provider's end-to-end service modeling, the team modeled over 25 business-critical services, creating a significant operational shift.

“In the past, a check-in counter failure would cascade into larger issues, and we’d be firefighting,” the IT lead said. “Now, with the [OpenText] Universal Discovery and CMDB modeling, we know exactly which counter is affected, which airline is impacted, and the flight and passenger load involved. The system automatically alerts the Operations Center, which can reroute passengers in real-time to avoid delays.”

The airport's VIP terminal serves high-profile individuals with private access, dedicated staff, and personalized services covering all travel formalities from immigration to customs. To ensure VIP passengers experience zero disruption, the new solutions continuously monitor booking, payment, and limousine scheduling systems—immediately identifying service degradations and triggering recommended contingency actions to preserve the premium experience.

For the first time, we extended monitoring to the OT side, including CCTV and BHS. This has added enormous value for our stakeholders by proactively protecting critical infrastructure. We have been widely praised by our leadership for leveraging this technology to offer data-driven visibility at both strategic and tactical levels.

IT Service Management Lead

Results

Real-time insights and intelligent monitoring have transformed IT from a backend function into a driver of service quality, stakeholder confidence, and customer satisfaction—with measurable impacts.

Prevented 30% of incidents with proactive monitoring

Powered by OpenText AI Operations Management, threshold-based alerts identify issues before they can disrupt services. By leveraging advanced monitoring, service modeling, and business value dashboards (BVDs), the systems improve service availability, enhance event correlation, and accelerate root cause identification to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).

Five BVDs were created for executive and operational use, delivering real-time insights into service health, operational KPIs, incident patterns, and the business impact of IT disruptions.

“We have been widely praised by our leadership for leveraging this technology to offer data-driven visibility at both strategic and tactical levels,” the IT lead said.

Aligned IT operations with business needs

The combination of OpenText Universal Discovery and CMDB with OpenText AI Operations Management delivered holistic visibility and aligned IT operations with business goals. This transformation supports passenger services and streamlines stakeholder coordination—improving service availability, speeding incident detection, and building stakeholder confidence.

Expanded system monitoring now provides real-time insights into how specific failures would impact stakeholder services, enabling preventive action and creating a more proactive, customer-focused operation.

Strengthened customer focus through IT excellence

Looking ahead, the IT lead envisions expanding AI-driven operational excellence through OpenText AI Operations Management’s capabilities.

“We are not an IT department, we are business enablers,” said the IT lead. “Everything we implement must add value to our business and support our airport’s objective of delighting the customer. With this provider's support, our monitoring and service modeling now feed directly into our Operations Center, helping to reduce passenger impact and ensure a smooth customer experience.”

How can we help?