easyJet
Share
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
easyJet is one of more than 100 case studies identified as part of the World Economic Forum’s Digital Transformation of Industries initiative. An overview of the DTI program can be found here.