Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[00:00]
Hello and welcome back to the HFS GCC Advantage. In this series, we speak with GCC/GBS leaders about how the GCC model itself is evolving. Today’s conversation is about how a capability center becomes a product, revenue, and global leadership engine. To discuss this, I have Mani Ganeshan, Senior Vice President, Head of APAC Engineering at Amadeus Labs India.
Amadeus is a fascinating example to discuss in this context because travel technology sits behind so many experiences that people and businesses depend on every day, right? Airlines, travel sellers, airports, hotels, travelers—all rely on platforms that need resilient, intelligent, scalable, consistently improving software and backend systems, and that makes the role of Amadeus Labs especially interesting.
Mani also brings a strong perspective across engineering, product, and regional leadership, which makes this a great conversation on how the next generation of GCC leadership will look. Mani, welcome to the show.
Mani Ganeshan — SVP and Head of APAC engineering at Amadeus Labs India[01:00]
Thank you, Achyuta. Looking forward to the session, and thanks to HFS and you for the opportunity to share the Amadeus story and also talk a little bit about what’s ticking in the GCC ecosystem here.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[01:14]
Thank you, Mani. Before we get into the India center, can you give us a brief overview of Amadeus’s role in the travel technology ecosystem, and your own journey leading Amadeus Labs in India and your past life?
Mani Ganeshan — SVP and Head of APAC engineering at Amadeus Labs India[01:29]
Okay. So, Amadeus, as you started the session, is the largest technology provider for travel. So we are pretty much the backbone on which the entire industry comes together and interplays and interacts to make travel a better experience for travelers like you and me. So we do have solutions for travel sellers like the MakeMyTrips and the Expedia of the world. We have solutions for the airlines, and a lot of global airlines are transacting business on the platform. We do have solutions for airports, payments, cruise companies, and so on. So be it any hospitality industry, be it any segment of travel—Amadeus has some solutions for it.
So traditionally, it’s a 40-year-old company. We started out as a GDS business, or a global distribution system business, where we used to take the inventory of airlines and reach it to travelers worldwide through an intermediary network of travel sellers. So that’s how the company started 40 years back. But then after that we diversified. We then went into the IT business for airlines and started providing solutions for them—for their e-commerce, for their digital strategy, for their departure control systems, and so on and so forth. And then we started replicating that model and going further into the travel industry, into the hospitality business, into the airports segment, and so on. So that’s how Amadeus has diversified, and that’s the set of solutions that we provide for the travel industry.
It’s extremely mission critical and extremely volume intensive, because on a yearly basis there is so much travel going on—more than two billion of these travels are managed on the Amadeus platform. So at any given point of time, on a daily basis, there are millions of passengers, millions of travelers who are getting off flights, getting into flights, getting into airports, and checking into hospitality hotels and so on. Millions of those are happening on a daily basis on the Amadeus platform. So that’s the industry we are in. We specialize in travel, and we are the largest technology provider there.
The India center came into existence in 2012. So we are around 14 years old now. We have scaled quite nicely, and we are now one of the largest engineering centers for Amadeus worldwide. And I joined Amadeus way back in 2012. I’m employee number one for this company. I am a technologist. It’s been more than 30, 35 years for me—close to 35 years for me in the industry—and I spent a long time working in the US and then moved back to India, wanting to be close to family and in the technology ecosystem that India is. And that’s when Amadeus came along at the same time. So it was a nice journey that Amadeus has had in India, and for me every day is an excitement, because travel is such a happening industry that even after 14, 15 years managing the Amadeus center in India, it’s still exciting day in, day out.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[04:48]
Yeah, and it’s seen ups and downs, right? COVID happened, and now there’s a travel boom, and different things. So many GCCs begin with the cost-capability mindset, but Amadeus seems to be playing a much larger role when it comes to product engineering and overall business impact outcome. So how has the India center evolved from a cost center to a value creator, and how does it contribute to Amadeus products, platforms, and solutions? I mean, we could share some examples.
Mani Ganeshan — SVP and Head of APAC engineering at Amadeus Labs India[05:21]
So what was happening in the late 2000s and the early 2010s was that a lot of large product organizations came to India primarily for access to the talent, right? And then they started going into how you achieve cost efficiency and how you scale in India, and then how you go further. So this is the journey a lot of GCCs took in India.
Amadeus, when we started the India center, we were very clear that at some point we see the India center well integrated into the global engineering footprint of Amadeus. We do not want to see a difference between what Amadeus does in the India center versus the center in France versus the center in Dallas, and so on. So the vision was very strong that the India center should be a global excellence center. That really helped us lay the right principles on how we find talent, how we attract the right talent, how we identify the missions that the India center will work on, how we set up the infrastructure so that we are very autonomous, and how you create a brand in the Indian ecosystem. So the vision drove a lot of these actions.
And so right from the beginning, it was clear that we need to identify ownership topics for the India center. As an example, in the late 2000s, that’s when the mobile industry was catching speed—the iPhones had just come out, and then there was standardization happening between the iPhones and the Android ecosystems. Amadeus decided to set up its mobile competency center in India. So pretty much the first line of mobile code that reached production for Amadeus was written in the India center. After that, we managed the entire evolution of how mobile has evolved across the technology world, and then how the mobile platform evolved into a digital platform, and how that has now become integral to the digital strategy of airlines and travel sellers. This entire journey for Amadeus was predominantly driven from the India center. So that’s how the vision for the India center was strong, and every action that we took mirrored that vision and converted that vision to a reality.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[07:48]
Great. As GCCs are becoming more strategic, Mani, thought leadership and brand maturity is also going to matter, right? When you were new in the industry you had a different kind of communication strategy, and today maybe it’s different. So, how is Amadeus Labs using thought leadership to build credibility with global stakeholders, and how has that helped the center move to becoming more strategic, from just being a delivery location?
Mani Ganeshan — SVP and Head of APAC engineering at Amadeus Labs India[08:16]
I go back to the vision. The vision was to create a global excellence center, and we knew we were consciously setting up our center in Bangalore. And Bangalore, you can argue, is the largest tech ecosystem in the world today, and it was even 15 years back. So we knew that if we have to do real complex engineering work in India, we have to attract the best of the best in the industry. And how you do that is a combination of several factors. Of course, you need to create an enriching work environment for people to come and join you. We need to make sure that the domain we are working on is exciting, the benefits, the employee perks, and so on. Those are all a given.
But then we also knew that if we are competing with the tier-one product companies of the world, our brand started on the back foot, because we are a B2B company. We are a platform organization which is not in front of the traveler. So travelers know airlines, travelers know travel sellers like the Lufthansas and the MakeMyTrips of the world, but they do not see how these travel players are getting powered in the background. So we were starting at a slight disadvantage, so we had to overcompensate.
And initially, when we came to India, we established our brand using our customers’ brands, because there are a lot of large airlines that people know, there are a lot of travel agencies that people know. But then we started setting up our own brand. One of the key aspects of creating your own brand is to start playing in the college ecosystem. I can tell you that in the first two, three years when we went to tier-zero and tier-one campuses in India, the IITs and NITs, the first year we got a day-45 slot. Right now we all know, with the intense competition for talent in that space, on day 45 you are not getting the best of the best. So we had to work very hard, go into the campuses, explain why travel is such an exciting space, explain that this is an industry where you write the software and you are directly a consumer of the software—the next week you travel—how we are piloting hundreds of airlines in the world.
And the part that really became a hook for us is the number of transactions that we process on our platform. So on a daily basis—our platform, because it has customers worldwide, we don’t see any quiet time on the platform, and it’s a SaaS-first company; everything is driven from our own platform and our own set of infrastructure. So we deal with hundreds of thousands of transactions a second—and I’m not even saying per minute or per hour and so on. Our average traffic that we see on the platform is 100,000 transactions a second. In a blink, 100,000 transactions have happened on the Amadeus platform. It’s that volume intensive and that mission critical. Without Amadeus, travel comes to a standstill in the world. That really attracted good-quality engineers.
I remember one of the first years when we went to a campus, we asked, how do you make travel exciting? So we created a concept of a passport and a boarding pass. Anyone who came to the pre-placement talk, we gave them a booklet which looked exactly like a passport, and it had material about our address in it. And then after you clear your test and you come for the interviews, we gave you a boarding pass. And when you get the offer, we had a stamp saying, okay, now you’re certified to come on board. So it kind of mimicked the journey a traveler would take at the airport. And the buzz that it created—we knew absolutely that this is the right industry and it can cause enough excitement.
So progressively, we started going into the industry, started participating in industry forums with our own speaking opportunities, partnering with companies like NASSCOM, and participated in a lot of employee engagement with companies like Great Place to Work and so on. So it’s been a combination of several aspects that went into creating the brand for Amadeus. But at the end of the day, the key differentiator is the quality of complex engineering that an employee gets to work with in Amadeus India. And we know that as long as engineers feel challenged, feel they’re learning, and feel they’re making a big impact to a complex, large industry, that’s enough to attract them. And I think it’s extremely important for a company like ours, which is in the background, to really find passionate individuals who want to contribute to the travel industry in a non-glamorous fun way.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[13:37]
Right. I think that’s the key challenge, and what you started actually helped. You talked about freshers, right? If I move on to slightly senior roles, and also two trends that we have seen in the past, Mani, is the increase in global roles from India in GCCs, and the second trend that we have seen is of course AI fluency. How are people building the India GCC center as an AI hub? So on these two points, what’s Amadeus doing, and how are you working to build AI fluency and building global roles from India?
Mani Ganeshan — SVP and Head of APAC engineering at Amadeus Labs India[14:15]
Okay, so I’ll start with global roles first. We knew one of the key aspects of maturity of the center—and to know that the center is operating at the highest level—is that every GCC starts by having work getting done out of India, but the decision makers are sitting in other locations, primarily in headquarters. For us it is a European organization, so a lot of our decision makers were sitting in Europe. One of the key differences in the way Amadeus has operated at the India center is that we constantly keep challenging our status quo. So every three to four years, the India leadership team comes along and says, okay, what next for us? What did we achieve in the last phase, and what next for us?
So we have constantly been innovating ourselves, challenging ourselves, and going back to headquarters saying, now that we are working on this aspect of the platform, why not extend that? Because if you’re working on, let’s say, the formatting and the document system of the company, why don’t you then start managing the e-tickets and all the itineraries and all the touch points that we have with the customer? So those are two platforms that can come together to serve the traveler better. So we have constantly been approaching it that way, and progressively moving leadership for these key aspects of the platform from the other centers of Amadeus to the India center.
So today, if I take a step back, we possibly have 30 to 40 global leaders of engineering of Amadeus sitting out of the India center. And what I mean by a global leader is someone who’s not only managing teams in India or managing aspects of the platform from the India center, but they do have teams sitting in other locations—be it France, be it Sydney, be it Dallas, be it London. There are teams and engineers sitting in these other locations who are reporting to a leader in India. So automatically your role has become global.
The other aspect of defining global is, if you’re sitting in India and managing aspects of the platform that are for global consumption. So we have many examples of that, where there are teams reporting to India leaders, or India leaders managing, let’s say, customer workshops for a platform element, for a product that is getting used by customers in North America, Europe, and all over the world. So we have many such examples of global leaders sitting in India. But the fact is, you have to be very intentional about it, because the one-way direction is quite natural—it happens because there is headquarters and there is the India center—but you need to be intentional so that you make it bidirectional. And of course, that comes only with the respect that you earn on the quality of outcomes that you impact, the output that you generate, and also the relationships that you build with your peers and leaders in global locations. So that’s how we have built global roles in India.
Now coming to AI: because we see AI as a very fundamental, transformational capability that it’s going to provide for the industry. Travel is a very highly interconnected industry. You cannot think of travel and just go to one player and say, okay, I approach an airline and the airline takes care of all my travel. No—there is the ground transportation, there is the airline, there is a travel seller who’s selling you the tickets, there are the baggage handlers, the ground handlers, the entire operational staff at the airport. There is the hospitality industry that is also coming in to make your travel a better experience. So travel is a highly interconnected system.
In the past we have had several solutions, and many players have had solutions, which are very siloed. But now, with the compute power increasing and AI also coming in as a large transformation, we see the possibility of the entire ecosystem getting connected. And that’s what we want to leverage AI for. Of course, we leverage AI for internal engineering efficiencies and internal operational efficiencies, but we also see AI unlocking a lot of business potential, primarily in connecting the ecosystem together. From India, we do have several explorations going on, several initiatives going on, that have now started to reach production.
We believe everyone not only should be AI aware but should be AI fluent, and that’s why we are running a massive upskilling program. We are letting employees explore the various foundational models and having specific initiatives for impacting business outcomes. We have several of those global leaders that I talked about earlier who are part of our AI initiative and are leading aspects of global AI transformation for Amadeus, which will then impact the wider industry. So that’s how we see the potential of AI and the advantages it will give the industry.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[19:44]
Great, Mani. So, last one—a 30-second wrap. Mani, five years down the line, where do you see Amadeus Labs India? How will it look?
Mani Ganeshan — SVP and Head of APAC engineering at Amadeus Labs India[19:54]
Oh, if I gaze into the crystal ball again, we just need to do more of the same. We need to start moving beyond output and getting into outcomes. How are the engineers in India and the leaders in India transforming travel? How are they impacting business outcomes for our customers? How are we supporting our regional commercial teams and the regional customers in the APAC region?
And another aspect is the Indian travel ecosystem. India is the second largest travel ecosystem in the world today, and we do have many customers in India—the airlines, the travel sellers, airports, and so on. India is growing rapidly, and the way travel happens in India, the travel patterns in India, are vastly different than the rest of the world. So I’m hoping the India center will start tapping into the Indian travel ecosystem and bring a lot of those learnings to the global platform. How do we do religious tourism? How do we do health tourism? All those things are very unique to India, and the scale at which all this happens in India is again very different. Can we, as the largest center for Amadeus in the region, bring all these learnings and provide solutions for these kinds of specificities, but also make in India, innovate in India, for travel patterns that are happening in the rest of the world? So that’s what I’m hoping, and that’s what the future would hold for the India center of Amadeus.
Achyuta Ghosh — Executive Research Leader, HFS Research[21:32]
Thank you, Mani. Thank you for joining in and sharing your perspectives. What I found valuable in the conversation is the way you connected engineering capability with product ownership, revenue impact, and global leadership from India. I also liked the emphasis on AI fluency, because the next phase of engineering will be defined by those who can use AI to improve product decisions, platforms, and customer outcomes. So thank you again for being a part of the HFS GCC Advantage.
Mani Ganeshan — SVP and Head of APAC Engineering at Amadeus Labs India[22:04]
All right, thanks a lot. Again, my pleasure to share the Amadeus story. Thank you.
