Dive Brief:
- United Airlines has shifted most of its IT systems to the cloud, EVP and CFO Mike Leskinen said during a Q1 2024 earnings call Tuesday.
- The domestic carrier has migrated between 70% and 90% of its workloads to cloud, Leskinen estimated; the rest run in on-premises infrastructure.
- United selected AWS as its preferred cloud vendor in 2021, leaning on the hyperscaler to drive digital transformation and provide analytics, database, IoT and machine learning capabilities.
Dive Insight:
The news cycle hasn’t been kind to United.
The fourth largest domestic carrier by capacity suffered through several safety incidents last month involving Boeing aircraft. In response, the Federal Aviation Administration announced it would heighten oversight and review United’s processes.
Broader Boeing safety concerns have added to the strain.
An FAA January decision to ground Boeing 737-9 Max aircraft pending resolution of an investigation into safety concerns cost United more than $200 million, Leskinen said. The company posted a net loss of $124 million on $12.5 billion in operating revenue during the three-month period ending March 31.
United CEO Scott Kirby voiced concerns about aviation industry technology standards in the wake of Southwest Airlines’ prolonged operational meltdown during the December 2022 holiday period.
Kirby warned during a January 2023 earnings call that many airlines and even the FAA had outgrown their IT infrastructure.
On Tuesday, Kirby said the recent spate of Boeing-related incidents were “an opportunity for us to step back and take what is already a very high standard of safety and find ways to make it even higher.”
United did not respond to a request for comment from CIO Dive, but Leskinen said during the earnings call that the company would provide more details about IT modernization plans in an as-yet-unscheduled investor day report.
Leskinen, who was promoted to the company’s executive team in September, framed cloud adoption as a long-term cost savings initiative.
“We've got significant opportunities within our technology organization to help drive efficiencies throughout the full airline,” but, he added, “you don’t save the cost of moving to the cloud until you shut the mainframe down.”
