Ieon’s cloud-based infrastructure at Muscat and Salalah Airports
Ieon along with its partners NCR have been responsible for the design, engineering, implementation and support of all IT networks, data centres, and related management systems across Muscat and Salalah Airports
The cloud-based infrastructure of the new facilities at Muscat and Salalah airports creates a platform for innovation, enabling more sophisticated passenger management through new technologies.
Naseer Ahmad Khan, CEO, ieon, shared his thoughts with the Times of Oman on the occasion of the opening of the new Muscat International Airport.
ieon along with its partners NCR have been responsible for the design, engineering, implementation and support of all IT networks, data centres, and related management systems across Muscat and Salalah airports.
Muscat and Salalah Airports are among the few in the world to be fully virtualised, with all systems hosted in a completely virtual computing environment. It is an approach that has created a foundation for launching next-generation services to improve both operational and passenger experience. This airport has capabilities that place it at the forefront of airport technologies in the world.
Discussing the benefits of the private cloud-based infrastructure implemented at Muscat and Salalah airports, Naseer Ahmad Khan, CEO of ieon, explained that it provides a central point of management along with modularised services which, because they are standardised, are easier to manage. “This brings a huge amount of resilience and stability, and actually creates a system that is quite difficult to break,” he said. “It creates a platform for innovation and you can deploy Internet of Things-based technology, such as beacon technology, to enable a more sophisticated passenger management application. You can innovate a huge amount because you have a great foundation where you can generate and create, and put new services to production faster than ever before.” Once the airport has gone live, and all systems have had a chance to mature into the live environment, Muscat Airport has a chance to really make an impression on the world stage.
“When you launch a new service or new product that is going to be used by either operational staff or customers, on physical infrastructure, it has to traverse multiple layers of technology,” Khan explained. “That is called ‘New Service Creation’. Creating new services on a harmonised virtual platform makes it safer and quicker to do. As the Internet of Things and beacon technology matures, this is an environment that those services and products can be launched within much more efficiently and with a higher success rate than physical environments.”
The blockchain is another technology that has been heralded as transformational for many industries and has the potential to streamline the entire passenger journey. A smart ticket, for example, would contain the traveller’s passport and their identity for biometric use, enabling them to walk through border control without having to see anyone. Only if that fails would they have to present their physical passport for validation.
“All the terms and conditions would be contained in your smart ticket, so it would allow you to operate within those set parameters, such as which class you want to fly, and if something goes wrong – such as a delay or cancellation – the ticket can automatically refund you,” said Khan. “For the passenger, it would provide a more efficient buying mechanism and a more seamless journey from purchase to arrival at destination.”
Based on the same model of full virtualisation and private cloud hosting at Muscat and Salalah, ieon has developed a five-year strategy for several airports in the Middle East. “In which they would build a revenue-generating IT infrastructure in year one, year two would break even, and by year three it would be generating profit,” he added.
“By looking at what we have built at Muscat and Salalah, other airports and industries can observe and learn the benefits of implementing a virtualised environment. Additionally, they can learn the benefits of leaner programme organisation, and how to implement a future-proofed, financially-efficient methodology,” Khan concluded.