Malaysia Airlines Awards Winners at Malaysia’s First Airline Hackathon Event

Sepang, 20 February 2017: Malaysia Airlines wrapped up its inaugural MABHackathon event with a final 25 hour hacking session at Malaysia Airlines Training Academy (MAA), Kelana Jaya, yesterday.

The MABHackathon challenge which started in November lasted over four months with a series of hacking labs and activities. The challenge started with the Discovery Challenge, followed by The Ideation Lab, Pre-hack and lastly, The Hack Day.

Malaysia Airlines’ Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Peter Bellew, Chief Operations Officer (COO), Izham Ismail and Chief Information Officer (CIO), Tan Kok Meng, came to support the airline’s initiative in improving customer experience and the efficiency of the airline’s operations via innovative solutions.

The two-day Hacking event saw a total of 100 participants grouped into 21 teams, competing to develop prototypes (mobile applications) from creative and innovative ideas utilizing the application programming interface (API) and platform provided by Malaysia Airlines Berhad IT Division, Amadeus and IBM.

After 25 hours developing the mobile app solutions, the group presented their prototypes to a panel of judges from the airline’s subsidiaries (MASwings, Firefly and Aerodarat Services), industry experts as well as partners from the Travel & Transportation Industry Leader, IBM Asia Pacific, Greater China and Japan, Maxis and Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC). All 21 applications were evaluated based on the user interface and experience, innovation, impact, resources sharing and overall quality.

Below were the finalists of the Hackathon event:

Malaysia Airlines’ CEO, Peter Bellew said, “We were delighted to receive such positive responses from university students, budding entrepreneurs and business partners to be a part of the airline’s digital transformation journey via the MABHackathon.”

“We hope that participants benefit from this initiative and continue pursuing their passion for innovation. As this will now be a yearly programme, we want to encourage more local talents to participate. This year’s winner will make history as they will be the first group to win an airline Hackathon in Malaysia.”

“We are optimistic that the MABHackathon will help position the airline to be more creative and innovative, and ultimately, provide our customers with a more superior experience while improving the efficiency of the airline’s overall operations, ” added Peter Bellew.

Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC), Director of Data Economy, Ir Dr Karl Ng said, “The Malaysia Airlines Hackathon is definitely one with a very clear end goal of improving Malaysia Airlines' services, and we are excited to see the innovative solutions being implemented. These participants came from all over the nation, they are the people that will take this country to a stage where data analytics and digital economy will form the bedrock of our economy."

Below are the winners of the event:

All winners are entitled for a three-month incubation programme in the Malaysia Airlines Innovation Lab and granted with exclusive entry to the National Big App Challenge 4.0, a Malaysia Digital Economy Corporation (MDEC) initiative.

The MABHackathon was sponsored by IBM, TCS, GoQuo, Cloudera Sedania, Grab, Thales, together with support from technology partners, Maxis, Amadeus, Getronics and TM as well as strategic partners, MDEC and MaGIC.

The event was opened for public from 9am to 6pm with free admission. Other activities that were observed during the event included Tech Talk series, startups showcase by event’s sponsors, technology and strategic partners as well as digital talent recruitment by Malaysia Airlines Berhad.

MABHackathon is a project led by the airline’s IT Division.