CGI has won a broad, and likely highly lucrative, deal with Fraport to spruce up the German airport operator’s IT infrastructure.

The agreement will run for five years.

Fraport runs Frankfurt Airport, Germany’s busiest air travel hub, as well as 28 other airports around the world. It had about 22,000 employees as of 2019.

The company’s deal with CGI has two primary objectives.

First, Fraport wants to move more of its applications to the cloud, something that many other large corporations are doing as well. Running software in the cloud means a company’s in-house IT staff have less hardware to manage.

CGI said that it will provide Fraport with “managed services”. The company didn’t say exactly what kind of managed services it will provide, but based on the deal context, CGI is likely being hired to manage the applications Fraport plans to move to the cloud.

The second core objective of the deal is supporting Fraport’s plan to deploy advanced technologies like AI in its operations. The emphasis is on optimizing the company’s ground handling business, which provides aircraft maintenance and related services like processing passengers’ luggage at arrival.

CGI, which has 90,000 employees worldwide, is a leading player in the IT consulting market. But it’s one of only several big fish in the pond: there are more than half a dozen IT consultancies that can boast of having tens of thousands of employees and an international market presence.

There is a very concrete reason why Fraport decided to go with CGI over its competitors .

CGI has more than 1,000 employees near Fraport’s Frankfurt headquarters who specifically focus on working with clients in the aviation sector. That combination of industry-specific expertise and physical proximity is something very few of CGI’s competitors can match.

It probably also helped that the two companies already have experience working together.

“Our collaboration with Fraport AG has been a success story since we first began working together on joint projects in 2021,” remarked CGI executive Ralf Bauer. “This new partnership is the next step in our ongoing and active support of Fraport’s major digitization projects

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