American Express Global Business Travel (GBT) announced its adoption of a cloud-based strategy to create an improved infrastructure, as it becomes a standalone travel management company.
GBT is migrating several business divisions, including IT, procurement, finance, human resources and administration to cloud-based systems.
“GBT is now a standalone company focused exclusively on the needs of corporate travel and working with cloud-based solutions offers us more flexibility, which is essential to supporting our business as we continue to transform and grow,” Pat Bourke, chief administrative officer for American Express Global Business Travel, told eWEEK. “Moreover, the selected vendors’ customer-centric system for products and services was a major factor in our decision as GBT is committed to providing our customers with the highest quality products and services. It is not simply an IT decision, but it’s fundamental to our business strategy to improve availability and service outcomes.”
GBT is partnering with multiple cloud-based platform companies, including NetSuite, a cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) specialist.
NetSuite enables GBT to achieve greater visibility into global operations through improved financial management, billing management and revenue management systems and solutions, GBT said.
Jive, a communications and collaboration company is upgrading GBT’s existing intranet platform to the cloud, enabling GBT to publish blogs internally, conduct polling, showcase video content and engage employees in new ways and across any device.
Additionally, Jive’s digital collaboration hub brings together standard business tools and platforms to improve employee productivity, alignment and innovation across GBT, a 14,000-employee company.
“GBT views cloud infrastructure as enabling a higher quality of service for its customers,” Bourke said. “As a company, it’s important that the way we operate is flexible, fast and efficient. By implementing a cloud infrastructure that does everything from streamlining financial reporting to train remote staff, we’re able drive greater efficiencies across the organization, resulting in higher performance on behalf of our clients.”
Bourke said GBT has spent the past year integrating cloud solutions through a phased approach, and the company expects to complete its transition to the cloud later this year.
“Now that GBT is a standalone company, we’re unique in the sense that we’re essentially a 100 year- old startup. Since day one as a new company, we have been embracing our startup side by constantly evaluating and optimizing the way we operate,” Bourke said. The cloud-based strategy is something we will continue to optimize to ensure our employees are equipped with the best tools that allow them to perform high on behalf of our customers.”