Gulf Air, the national carrier of Bahrain, has created a private cloud IT environment in partnership with Red Hat solutions. The platform will enable the company to monitor and analyse online conversations about it.

As part of this project, Gulf Air has deployed Red Hat Enterprise Linux, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform (JBoss EAP), and Red Hat Storage as the platform for its innovative big data solution, Arabic Sentiment Analysis.

Gulf Air has developed a sentiment analysis solution based on big data technologies that is capable of addressing social media posts in both Arabic and English for Arabic Sentiment Analysis. The solution is based on an open source Hadoop big data framework running across a server cluster in Gulf Air’s private cloud environment and using Red Hat products including Red Hat Enterprise Linux, JBoss EAP, and Red Hat Storage.

Gulf Air’s private cloud encompasses 200 servers running more than 100 core applications and holds more than 50 terabytes of data. The scalability that Gulf Air achieves in this environment with Red Hat solutions provides sufficient capacity to host the big data solution, which in turn helped Gulf Air avoid additional infrastructure investment including hardware expenditure, said a press release.

Today, Arabic Sentiment Analysis processes social media posts and provides easy-to-understand reports on what customers are saying about Gulf Air. Gulf Air's IT team also uses them as the basis for a wider analysis of the state of the market and actions taken by their competitors.

Commenting on the investment, Dr Jassim Haji, director of information technology at Gulf Air, said:
“As an airline, it is crucial to know what our customers are thinking. We want to know who is satisfied with Gulf Air’s service, who is not and why, and what Gulf Air can do to improve its services to passengers.”

“The big data solution deployed is an open source one, which meant no special license fees to pay, while the infrastructure where it runs is based on our existing open source-based cloud environment and virtual servers, which meant no hardware investment was required,” he added. – TradeArabia News Service