easyJet

Implementing hybrid cloud solution has helped enhance customer satisfaction and also increased scalability of operations 

Key facts

• easyJet¹ is the largest airline in the UK by number of passengers carried, recording revenues of £4.7 billion (to Mar 2015) and growth of over 20% over the last 12 months.
• easyJet first saw cloud computing as a way to minimize costs, but then realized it also provided a critical element to support business agility.
• Building on its reputation for providing great service at low cost, the airline wanted to improve the customer experience without adding staff or IT infrastructure.

Uniqueness

• The airline outsourced its IT infrastructure and operated with a lean team of IT professionals.
• Hybrid cloud solutions helped easyJet to build a more flexible, scalable infrastructure that it can use to introduce new features quickly and affordably.
• Exploring the Platform-as-a-Service solution rather than depending on its internal IT system, easyJet focused on a hybrid combination of on-premises and cloud solutions to deliver the project faster.

Value

• The solution enables flexibility to implement new capabilities and increase scalability, while taking advantage of existing infrastructure. easyJet can now handle fluctuating workloads more easily.
• The company has also decreased time to market by developing new applications in the cloud. The hybrid cloud solution has helped easyJet to cut deployment costs and to simplify management.
• Customer satisfaction has improved significantly as a result of faster delivery of new services faster at more affordable rates.

Approach

• easyJet’s legacy reservation system could not provision for allocated seating, so the airline added a feature on the cloud rather than relying on internal IT.
• Instead of dumping on-premises IT whilst it still delivered value, easyJet’s IT ran the new features in the cloud and mashed it with its existing infrastructure.

Footnote
1. Sources: easyJet; Microsoft; WEF/Accenture Analysis