EasyJet

• EasyJet


  Largest airline in the United Kingdom and the second-largest short-haul airline carrier in the world (behind Ryanair) with more than 800 domestic and international routes in 32 countries
• EasyJet

  • Based in Luton, England
  • Has expanded rapidly since its founding in 1995, propelled by a series of acquisitions as well as fulfilling an important market need for low-cost airline services
  • Carries more than 70 million passengers per year
• Having a reliable and robust system for booking and managing reservations while keeping costs low is a key business requirement for EasyJet
• EasyJet's existing reservation system


  Did not have the capability to add the new feature of allowing customers to select their seats on a given flight when they made their reservations online
• EasyJet's solution

  1. Retained the core reservation system as is

  2. Hosted the seat allocation service in the cloud using Microsoft's Azure cloud service
• Microsoft's Azure cloud service


  Offered a better integration of on-premises and cloud services compared to other public cloud computing platforms EasyJet had tried
• How EasyJet used Microsoft Azure

  1. Used it to build services that communicate wirelessly at airports without running up major airport charges for new services desks

  2. Enabled EasyJet's information system developers to write their own software program code for seat allocation and use as much or as little processing power as needed to test the service

  3. Turned out to be much faster and cost-effective to have the public cloud actually host the new seat allocation service rather than use EasyJet's internal IT infrastructure
• EasyJet's cloud strategy

  • Hybrid cloud - not moving its entire IT infrastructure to the cloud, only specific functions its internal IT infrastructure can't easily handle
  • New capabilities are integrated with the company's existing IT Infrastructure
• By enhancing its systems to offer allocated seating

  EasyJet was able to increase customer satisfaction by 5 percent and add 7 percent to its revenue growth
• In the following two years

  EasyJet increased customer conversion to its website by 13 percent
• EasyJet's management believes

  Good customer experience combined with low prices clearly differentiates the company from competitors
• Airlines on average spend 2 percent of their revenue on IT infrastructure; EasyJet spends only half a percent of its revenue on IT
• It is much easier to eliminate a cloud service than to remove the functionality from the company's core internal system
• The right technology at the right price will improve organizational performance
• EasyJet was saddled with an outdated IT infrastructure that was far too costly and unwieldy for adding new services, such as online passenger seat selection, that were being offered by competitors
• This caused EasyJet to lose customers and prevented the company from operating as efficiently and effectively as it could have
• Hybrid cloud strategy


  An organization maintains part of its IT infrastructure itself and part using cloud computing services
• Using cloud computing for part of its IT infrastructure enables EasyJet to expand and offer new services at very affordable prices
• EasyJet pays for only the computing capacity it actually uses on an as-needed basis and did not have to make extensive and costly new infrastructure investments