Credit: Dnata
Soma Technology Group has played an integral role in helping to support and deliver a complex system migration project using cloud integration platform SnapLogic for airline services company Dnata catering Australia.
In April 2018, Dnata, which is part of the Emirates Group, acquired Qantas’ catering businesses, Q Catering and Snap Fresh.
Following the acquisition, Dnata sought out an integration platform to help migrate all the applications and systems used by Q Catering, which were based on Amazon Web Services (AWS) infrastructure to Dnata’s Microsoft Azure cloud system.
The integration work involved migrating Qantas’ passenger and scheduling systems, enterprise resource planning (ERP), real-time changes and other third party systems.
Soma technology group was the managed service and hosting provider for the bulk of the new Dnata infrastructure as they moved off the Qantas system, and also helped to deliver most of the integrations with guidance, support and training from the SnapLogic professional services team.
Dnata only had a three month window to find, test and implement a solution and turned to SnapLogic after a recommendation from the Emirates Group IT team.
Dnata catering Australia IT operations manager Vinod Nemade said it had a very tight schedule for this major migration and integration project, and building a new in-house competency team was not a viable solution. In Australia, Dnata employs more than 4,000 people across nine cities and 17 locations, producing more than 64 million meals and services for more than 246,000 flights per year.
In siding with SnapLogic’s integration platform, Nemade said it was able to complete nearly 30 complex integrations, with the help of its internal IT team.
“This resulted in our ability to efficiently migrate critical systems and complete integrations without any interruption to our newly adopted business operations and customer delivery, all while meeting our aggressive timeline goals,” Nemade said.
SnapLogic field CTO Brad Drysdale added that in any industry, integrating business and IT operations after an acquisition is never straightforward.
“When you add to that a need to maintain meal supply to more than 600 flights per day, to hundreds of thousands of passengers, each with specific and frequently-changing meal requirements, and a very tight timeline on top of it, it becomes incredibly complex,” he said.
"We’re proud to have supported the Dnata catering team in Australia through this period and look forward to working with them on future projects.”
