Executive interview: Rajesh Naidu, Expedia | Computer Weekly
Summary
Beyond the virtual interview process, Naidu says: “Making the switch from an old company to a new company during the pandemic was daunting at times, because you are leaving a known culture and a known surrounding with individuals you worked with.” The travel sector suffered significantly during the pandemic, and as Naidu notes, the industry needed to reinvent itself, ready for when the surge in post-pandemic travel would resume. In addition, Naidu says the platform needs to process 600 billion artificial intelligence (AI) predictions a year. “We have over 70 petabytes of data and in some cases we are using AI and ML [machine learning] to evaluate 360,000 permutations on a single web page.” From an IT architecture perspective, Naidu says the challenge for Expedia is to provide an architecture that uses building blocks that scale easily and the need to remove complexity from its current platform, which has grown organically through company acquisitions. There’s going to be moments when we provide a centre of excellence for expertise, but in many other cases, we are actually doing the hands-on design work with the teams.” The common goal in Expedia’s IT architecture, says Naidu, is to build what he describes as one of the “largest Kubernetes migrations in history”. By making use of public cloud paradigms and refactoring applications where necessary, Naidu says Expedia will be able to develop new software functionality much faster than before.