How technology is enabling Melbourne Airport’s growth

Melbourne Airport, currently Australia’s second busiest, is aiming to overtake Sydney to become the country’s number one destination airport.

For Melbourne Airport CIO Anthony Tomai and his team, that overall strategic objective fuels their approach to create and deliver tech innovation at the airport campus at Tullamarine, northwest of the city.

“The vision is to become Australia’s favourite airport destination,” he says. “Technology has a key element in that broader corporate strategy in that last year was the first time we embedded technology as part of our corporate scorecard. The team and I pulled together a technology strategy focused on enabling the corporate strategy.”

Melbourne Airport has been connecting Victoria to the world for 50 years, and December 2023 was the airport’s busiest month since the Covid-19 pandemic, with a total of over three million passengers. And those numbers are expected to grow to about 76 million by 2042. Key to this is construction of a third runway. Currently, 45 planes take off and land per hour and this new runway could take the airport up to 90 planes per hour. In addition, the Melbourne Airport Rail, connecting the airport to the suburban network, subject to approvals, is expected to be delivered by 2029.

Tomai and the team are responsible for a wide range of operations at the airport, including operational technology as well as corporate IT.

“The technology operation here is quite expansive in that we manage all facets of traditional enterprise IT,” he says. “The main bit that has a lot more focus is the operational technology, and that’s everything from a kiosk to print your boarding pass and a bag tag, to the auto bag drop technology, which takes your bag from the conveyor at check-in to the plane. All of that operational technology is supported by my team.”

A key element to enable the vision of becoming Australia’s preferred airport, says Tomai, is customer delight and making every part of a passenger’s journey as easy as possible. “It’s deploying technologies such as digital wayfinding,” he says. “It’s providing frictionless wi-fi access for our passengers and making sure we can get passengers through the terminal quickly and safely on to their destination.”

Order amid complexity

Security and uptime is a huge component of what Tomai and the team focus on.

“All the security screening technology is underpinned by our network, and we manage that day and night,” he says. “It’s a 24/7 operation regulated by the Government, so there’s a huge emphasis on uptime and reliability.”

While Melbourne Airport employs approximately 500, there could be up to 20,000 people working at the airport on any given day working for other stakeholders including airlines, retailers, Border Force, and the Australian Federal Police.

With so many providers in the ecosystem, Tomai says it’s essential to keep the operation running without interruption.

“It’s really about the critical nature of the operation,” he adds. “It’s about uptime resilience and providing certainty around the technology being there, always on every day, and making sure we’re ultimately putting passenger safety first and providing reliability, not only to the internal airport employees, but all the operational technology and our broader ecosystem.”

Where partners help

Melbourne Airport leans heavily on its technology partners to achieve its strategic imperatives, according to Tomai.

“We have a 24/7 operation and a vendor community that helps us enable that uptime and reliability,” he says. “It’s not all on me and the internal team. We have good certainty in our partnerships and relationships with suppliers so it’s not a burden, and quite often, we’re on the front foot, and we’re generally ahead of it.”

One key partner since 1998 is Cisco, which has been tasked with creating a long-term future state architecture strategy to help the airport innovate with investment directly linked to technology integrated within the airport.

“Cisco underpin everything we do,” says Tomai. We have some 800 network appliances, and we’re going to grow to 1,000 wi-fi access points across the campus. Between Melbourne Airport’s internal technology team, our managed service provider Ethan and Cisco, we’re constantly looking to evolve the way in which we transform our technology estate. We will lean on them, and they’ll support us in making sure we follow through on what we need to achieve.”

Key initiatives underway

The Melbourne Airport team plan in 10-year horizons, and Tomai says it’s forecasting far forward in terms of the capital development plan and how technology needs to realize that.

“The airport is constantly evolving,” he says. “We’ve got a lot of expansion going into Terminal 2 International and technology needs to enable all of that, so we partner with the construction operation to ensure we’re architecting and solutioning all the right bits of technology for the next 10 years of development planning.”

Alongside that, they’re looking to improve their data centre and innovate ways of providing networking across the campus, such as SD-WAN.

On the passenger side, it’s about digital way-finding, or as Tomai says, providing digitization on a panel or screen where passengers can navigate the terminal more easily.

Plus, they want to improve customer car parking with wayfinding and QR codes to ensure passengers know where they need to leave their vehicle when they come into a car park.

Tomai says he and the team have a lot of work to achieve the goal of becoming Australia’s preferred airport destination, but it’s a very rewarding pursuit so far.