Conjuring cohesion: An interview with TUI Travel Group CIO Mittu Sridhara

Sridhara explains how TUI is attempting to reduce the amount of systems it has while exploring new technologies to give it a competitive edge

TUI Travel is a global leisure firm that owns Thomson, First Choice and Laterooms.com, as well as 216 other brands. The firm enjoyed its most successful year in 2013 - bringing in £15.5bn in revenue, and £589m in profits.

Tasked with ensuring that the firm's IT is up-to-scratch so that it can continue its growth is group CIO and CTO Mittu Sridhara.

Sridhara was previously CIO of betting firm Ladbrokes and joined TUI in March 2012, taking over from Jim Mann, who had retired after 12 years at the firm.

The company has a presence in four industries: online through its booking websites, as an airline, a transportation company for airport transfers and holiday tours, and a hotelier. Sridhara's task is to ensure that it has all of the tools necessary to give it an edge against its competitors.

"We're on a journey to continue to enhance the customer experience and making TUI more of a cohesive set of businesses," he told Computing.

Sridhara explained that the company has a presence in 180 geographies with different businesses carrying out similar tasks, much of the time using different technology. He aims to make sure that going forwards, the company creates common solutions and processes across the whole business.

One example of a new product that is being rolled out internationally is the TUI digital assistant (TDA). The first incarnation of the mobile app launched in the UK as MyThomson in July 2013. It currently aims to give customers more information about a booking that they have already made, but Sridhara hopes that eventually it will become a "mobile travel concierge".

"It is now available across eight countries and nine brands. It is built on a Titanium framework, meaning that the back-end is all cloud-based. It integrates with our existing systems to pull information from our systems. The ultimate goal is to integrate it with a lot of our underlying systems," he said.

In TUI's Nordic marketplace, once a holiday is booked, using the app, the customer can talk to someone who is in the destination and ask them questions about it - this is a feature that TUI is keen to roll out in other geographies to ensure consistency.

With an organisation with so many different brands and locations, it is no wonder that Sridhara suggested that TUI has "every flavour of technology that there is". He claimed that even similar systems have different technologies, and TUI has a huge task in reducing the amount of systems it has.

But there are examples where Sridhara has worked with his team to accomplish this.

"When it comes to our web platforms [across all brands] we are working with Hybris as the underlying platform, with Endeca as our search engine and middleware from Tibco," he said.

But the company's backend systems vary, and this is where Sridhara and his team still have to make some difficult decisions.

"Some of the backend systems are associated with business processes that they enable. Where it makes sense to make them common we will, where it makes sense to keep them separate, we will as well. In our different markets we have our different business models and they require slightly different backend systems," he stated.

He gave the example of one geography having to do its yield and pricing differently to another. This means that it may need a different product, or use the same system but in a different way.

The changes TUI is making are not restricted to the technology, its employees have also been affected.

"We are creating one team in digital transformation and IT so that we can get one common architecture of employees and technology to deliver common solutions and services as far as possible," Sridhara explained.

But TUI is no different to any other digital business in that it is looking to invest and upscale its own people, and is finding it tough, said Sridhara.

"With big data, for example, if you look at MongoDB and the Hadoop cluster and what sits on top and how you interpret it, people generally understand the underlying technology but it is how you extend that," he claimed.

The firm will outsource certain skillsets, particularly if it is a commodity service within IT, while it will look to keep certain teams and personnel - such as those involved in key decision analytics - in-house.

Flying forwards

TUI Travel has a partnership with two companies in the US that make investments in technology firms and works with them to identify what the latest trends are in the industry. TUI Travel then runs some of its own internal tests to see whether technology is worth adopting and if it is, the firm deploys the technology.

"One of the technologies that we're looking into is how we can get to more of a software-defined data centre [SDDC], it's an area we're in investing in," Sridhara said.

"It very much does [have a purpose]; clearly not all of it is ready yet for the volumes and transactions and scale in which we do things but certain elements are starting to become available. It's up to us to continue to test and see when these solutions are viable for production at the scale we need it and then we can look to deploy them," he added.

TUI is also looking at deploying a hybrid cloud model.

"Everything that is new is going into a pure cloud-based architecture and everything that is old is being prepared for the hybrid cloud.

"The pure public cloud will be a combination of Amazon Web Services and/or others - there are other vendors that are coming out with slightly different price points and service levels and we are in discussions with them," he stated.

For the company's private cloud, the key issue is making sure that the data remains in the EU.

"We have some of our own data centres already, but we are in discussions. We know it is going to be a European-based data centre and we are deciding where exactly it is hosted," Sridhara said.

He emphasised that the reason the data remains in the EU is not just because of the overhaul of EU data protection laws, but because of agreements that TUI has with many of its customers.

The organisation is also looking into technologies like Splunk on the backend, as well as caching technologies.

"We're looking into how quickly a page renders on the online space or mobile app, so we're working with companies to work out how we can cache differently," he said.

Sridhara suggested that other technologies in the DevOps space could be used for TUI's big data strategies.

"A large volume of logs can lend themselves very nicely to big data [strategies]; both for operational purposes and spotting trends, but also from a sales perspective to understand what elements of your API are consumed and which of them are resulting in a transaction or a sale," he said.

Predictive analytics is another area that the company is working on as an extension to how it currently uses customer data.

"We use anonymous personalisation - so if you've come to our website and we don't know who you are, based on what you look at we personalise it to determine what you see next, and then present you with tailored offers," he said.

But he emphasised that customer data is not used by TUI Travel without consent.

"Transparency with consumers and respecting privacy is key - it is about personalising offers to them and serving them better," he said.

He also claimed that as the company already covers flights, accommodation and transfers, it doesn't need to share data with third parties.

"We don't share data, we don't need to and we don't as a policy," he said.

The changing roles of technology and the CIO

Sridhara believes that the CIO role is changing - but that other roles are also changing at the same time.

"Everyone has to become more savvy, especially in B2B, and perhaps sometimes in B2C," he said.

"The role of the CIO is to help a business differentiate itself and technology becomes that key element because it is consumed by the customer, so the CIOs that are not customer-facing increasingly need to be, and they also need to be able to create a more agile business to change with its consumer," he said.

As for the future of technology, Sridhara believes that the changes that are currently occurring in the industry are leading to a path where CIOs will predominantly be buying services rather than hardware and software.

"We are going to be buying services and caring less about the underlying technology. If we are buying software-as-a-service it could be using Oracle, MongoDB - whatever I need to get the job done, but I'll be buying a service.

"Do I care what's going on in the background? Of course, I need to ensure that it performs to the required level, but once that is met I'm less interested in the underlying technology," he said.