Colibri and RDG Futureproof UK Rail Ticketing with a Cloud-Native Transformation

Colibri Digital partnered with Nomo Fintech to pioneer AI-driven fintech revolution. Together, we built a serverless data lake which resulted in real-time data processing, enhanced analytics, agility for innovative projects and more.

In 2015, a top-tier consultancy partnered with Colibri Digital to grow its London-based Big Data division. Colibri supported the company’s Fortune 500 clients on key initiatives, including retail analytics, IoT-driven maintenance for semiconductor manufacturing, and power supply optimisation across Europe.

Somark, a pharma-tech company, has spent the past two years trying to deliver an Azure cloud-native application to its clients in production. Colibri was approached to perform an architecture and security review and help push the application over the line.

Regus, a leading multinational provider of white-label office space, needed a new way to track the conversion of sales leads to optimise its sales pipeline. Currently, the sales process is tracked across a multitude of in-house and third-party hosted Software as a Service (SaaS) system, making it incredibly difficult to trace an enquiry from source to conversion.

Hiscox, a leading provider and underwriter of specialist insurance services, wanted a mechanism for performing real-time price comparison and market intelligence against their competitors in the UK market.

Colibri worked with Shell, one of the world's largest oil and gas companies, to deliver an Azure advanced analytics stack for its global lubricants business. Shell was struggling to design a solution capable of processing vast quantities of dirty data from various sources.

Mana, a London-based ed-tech startup, was stepping into the next phase of its growth journey. The client's platform provides a curated directory of experts, which mainly includes tech leaders, career advisors, lifestyle gurus, and teachers. It allows users to bring content from YouTube, Instagram, Udemy, TikTok, and other platforms into a portfolio for their followers.

The client, a leading Tier 1 European investment and retail bank, was creating a new digital banking app. With its enormous client base and highly sensitive data, the app’s backend was complex and required careful planning from a DevSecOps standpoint.

Center Parcs UK and Ireland, a leading provider of family forest retreats, needed to upgrade its digital services strategy to improve online customer experiences while ensuring security and cost efficiency.

Center Parcs UK and Ireland, renowned for its family-friendly forest retreats, sought to improve the security of its AWS environment to meet stringent industry standards and ensure operational integrity.

Center Parcs UK and Ireland, known for its family-friendly forest retreats, required an upgraded identity management solution to enhance security and meet growing demands.

Spanish Power Grid provides critical energy and utilities for the nation. The variation in geography and weather across Spain meant that power generators needed to provide stable output in a wide range of conditions, creating complex operational requirements for the company. Outages were highly undesirable and penalised by the hour by the national regulator.

Ageas, one of the world’s largest insurance companies, processes an enormous number of daily requests for insurance quotes as well as underwriting approvals. Sometimes exceeding 5,000 requests per second, each of these requests needs to be screened by increasingly sophisticated algorithms to ensure validity and detect potential cases of insurance fraud.

Fendix Media, a digital media agency, prides itself on offering unrivalled digital access to the NHS, assisting trusts with direct revenue generation through the placement of targeted adverts across the NHS intranet. Over the last couple of years, Fendix Media have grown rapidly and now offers digital media products to almost every major NHS trust in the UK.

BB2, a startup financial firm based in London, had built a new digital bank on AWS using cloud-native technology, real-time streaming data feeds, and serverless components. Creativity and innovation have always been the cornerstone of BB2’s business model, and the bank is keen to reinforce this value through innovative digital and electronic banking services.

Digital Taxonomy's client base continues to grow, rapidly attracting several large blue-chip enterprise clients, each bringing their complex requirements. Colibri Digital were approached to undertake this review, and to provide advice, designs, and implement solutions to ensure Digital Taxonomy were optimally positioned for their next phase of growth.

Center Parcs continues to grow and evolve, but its Arcserve tape backup solution had become outdated. They were costly, slow to restore from, and unable to meet the demands of a growing dataset.

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR), a leading British manufacturer of luxury and sport utility vehicles, designs and develops vehicles under the Jaguar and Land Rover brands. To gain deeper insights from vehicle data and enhance both efficiency and competitiveness, JLR partnered with Colibri to design and build a tailored data platform capable of delivering actionable intelligence.

Since launching in 1994, Eurostar has transported over 150 million passengers, moving thousands beneath the Channel each day. To support its mobile booking and overbooking applications, Eurostar needed reliable hosting and support solutions.

Rail Settlement Plan Limited (RSP) delivers essential services such as ticketing, travel information, and refund processing on behalf of its member companies. The Live Sales Management (LSM) platform (hosted on AWS and managed by Colibri) supports National Rail’s Ticket on Departure service, enabling customers to purchase tickets online or via third parties and collect them at their convenience.

The NRE Modernisation (NREM) project, delivered in partnership with Train Information Services Limited (TISL), involved the redesign, build, and deployment of the AWS infrastructure supporting the latest version of the National Rail Enquiries (NRE) applications. NRE, operated by RDG, provides essential information on train times, routes, and fares for passengers across the UK rail network.

The Live Sales Management (LSM) service is a key component of the Ticket on Departure feature offered by National Rail, part of the Rail Delivery Group. It enables customers to purchase tickets online or via third parties in advance and collect them at their convenience. Managed by Colibri, LSM plays a vital role in improving both customer convenience and operational efficiency.

The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) unites Britain’s railway operators under a single organisation, aiming to deliver meaningful improvements in the customer experience. Colibri hosts several AWS-based services for RDG, but historically, each required separate credentials per user, creating both administrative complexity and security challenges.

Over the past decade, Colibri has partnered closely with the Rail Delivery Group (RDG) to deliver essential services such as ticketing, travel information, and refund processing. This latest collaboration supports RDG’s Rail Data Marketplace (RDM), with Colibri providing service management capabilities.

Colibri has built a strong, long-standing partnership with Rail Delivery Group (RDG), supporting the AWS-hosted applications and services that power its digital solutions. Most recently, Colibri deployed a new analytics platform to monitor the performance and cost-efficiency of these critical AWS services, ensuring they remain optimised, reliable, and aligned with RDG’s strategic goals.

As the industry moves towards digital, customer-first experiences, Rail Delivery Group (RDG) partnered with Colibri to modernise its legacy infrastructure and deliver cloud-ready solutions fit for the future.

The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) brings together all the UK’s passenger and freight rail companies, High Speed 2, and Network Rail to work towards a shared goal: delivering a better railway for customers across Great Britain. As part of a recent initiative, RDG aimed to help National Rail Enquiries provide passengers with more accurate, real-time train location information.

The Rail Delivery Group's (RDG) customers were facing performance issues with the National Reservation System (NRS) due to latency caused by the legacy Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) network.

The Rail Delivery Group (RDG) operates a large AWS estate managed by Colibri. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, reduced passenger numbers and falling ticket revenue meant cost control became a top priority. With existing Reserved Instance (RI) plans nearing expiration, RDG saw an opportunity to reassess their approach and explore AWS's newer Cost Saving Plans to ensure long-term value.

Rail Delivery Group (RDG) provides the essential services and support needed to help its members succeed, from national ticketing and reservations to information systems for passengers and staff. A key part of this is the Live Sales Management (LSM) database, which has long been hosted on AWS EC2 instances. While the system performed well, it presented limitations during failure events and required ongoing manual management.

When the Rail Delivery Group set out to personalise how millions of passengers plan their journeys, they needed more than a new front-end feature, they needed an infrastructure foundation that could handle complex, daily-updated rail data at scale.

Helio Intelligence, a leader in political intelligence, needed to transform how analysts processed real-time developments, without sacrificing speed, trust or editorial rigour. Together with Colibri Digital and AWS, they built and deployed a production-grade, agentic Gen AI platform that now surfaces, evaluates and summarises high-value content in minutes instead of hours.