Amadeus IT Group

Amadeus IT Group, S.A. is a Spanish multinational technology company that provides software for the global travel and tourism industry. The parent company of Amadeus IT Group, holding over 99.7% of the firm, is Amadeus IT Holding S.A. It was listed on the Spanish stock exchanges on 29 April 2010.[6]

Amadeus has central sites in Madrid, Spain (corporate headquarters and marketing), Sophia Antipolis, France (product development), London, UK (product development), Breda, Netherlands (development), Erding, Germany (Data center) and Bangalore, India (product development) as well as regional offices in Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Dubai, Miami, Istanbul, Singapore, and Sydney.[7][8] At market level, Amadeus maintains customer operations through 173 local Amadeus Commercial Organisations (ACOs) covering 195 countries. The Amadeus group employs 21,500 employees worldwide,[9] and listed in Forbes' list of "The World's Largest Public Companies" as No. 985.[10]

History

Since 2004, the company has invested €1 billion in R&D.[11] In 2005, Amadeus was delisted from the Paris, Frankfurt and Madrid stock exchanges when BC Partners and Cinven bought their stake from three of the four founding airlines and the rest of the capital floated from institutional and minority shareholders. The transition from distribution system to technology provider was reflected by the change in its corporate name to Amadeus IT Group in 2006. In 2009, Amadeus invested about €257 million in R&D.[12]

In September 2014, Air France sold a 3% stake in the firm for $438 million.[13] In November 2017, Amadeus invested in global mapping tech provider AVUXI.[14]

Vulnerability discovered

On 15 January 2019, the hacker and activist Noam Rotem discovered a major vulnerability affecting nearly half of all airlines worldwide. While booking a flight with Israeli national carrier El Al, he came across a significant security breach that allows anyone to access and change private information on flight bookings. The same breach was then discovered to include 44% of the international carriers market, potentially affecting tens of millions of travelers.[15]

Contribution to open source

According to a May 2015 investigation, Amadeus has contributed to the Docker open source software project.[16]

Business model and other business lines

In 2000, Amadeus was awarded the development of two new operational applications for British Airways and Qantas: the inventory management and the departure control systems.[17] These products were outside of the core expertise domain of Amadeus and were built with the expertise of the airlines.