Middle Eastern Carriers Enter Growth Phase

Middle Eastern Carriers Enter Growth Phase, with Cloud Support

The growth of low cost carriers in the Middle East is proving a fertile stamping ground for airline operations management software, with NZ-headquartered merlot.aero signing a contract with Afghanistan's Kam Air; a win that CEO and President Mark McCaughan rates as a good stepping stone for the company into one of the world's fastest growing regions.

The win comes on the back of industry reports for a profitable six months for low cost carriers in the region, despite regional unrest and political uncertainty.

Regional tourism markets in Arab countries are growing, fuelled by more than a decade of investment by governments. As a consequence, the Middle East's point-to-point market is seeing significant rise in passenger demand and the Arab Air Carriers Organization reports international traffic within the Arab world has improved to double-digit growth in the first half of 2013.

Low cost carriers in the Middle East are also taking lessons from other developing markets such as Asia and South America, which have demonstrated strong growth on the back of such carriers, particularly where there are large, and young, populations, a high level of mobility and high disposable income.

Kam Air will be the first to use the European Data Centre for long term cloud deployment to forecast, organise, plan, predict measure and report on activity to optimise daily aircraft and crew utilisation. It has been operating for 10 years with Kabul as its hub and is Afghanistan's largest privately-owned airline, operating scheduled domestic passenger services and regional international services. Kam Air's fleet comprises Boeing 767, A320, MD83/87 and B747 cargo planes.

Mark McCaughan explains that merlot.aero's SaaS, leveraging cloud technology to deliver software, data access and storage remotely rather than via local servers, provides secure, fast and affordable access to proven decision support tools without large capital outlay.

"With merlot.aero, airline personnel have instant, real-time visibility to critical data and can update and manage operational information anywhere, anytime via a secure connection."

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