Our network is a key component to making everything work

Globally, the airlines industry is going through tough timesrising ATF

prices, dwindling passengers and higher operational costs are pushing airlines

across the world to cut costs.



Bill Maguire, CIO, Virgin America leads the development of a highly efficient
and flexible technology platform upon which sits the airlines low-cost,

high-value business strategy. His career was shaped during his 23 years with the

United States Postal Service, where he started in Field Operations in the

Washington D C, area and progressed to manage one of the agencys largest

computer operations data centres in North America. Excerpts

Can you talk about the airlines technology infrastructure?



As San Franciscos hometown airline, Virgin Americas brand-new planes offer

passengers interactive in-flight entertainment systems, plugs for laptops and

other portable electronic devices, the ability to order food or chat with other

guests from their own video-screen and a host of other features aimed at

bringing a little fun back to flying. Virgin Americas expansion plan is to be

in thirty cities within five years. I believe that Virgin Americas approach to

technological innovation will give the airline a competitive advantage, by

utilizing efficiencies to keep its cost structure low while enhancing the

customer experience. Virgin Americas strategy is to have an infrastructure

thats robust, scalable and flexible. Cybernet-Slash Support is a key

constituent of Virgins ecosystem of technology partners and has helped the

company with opex optimization solutions.

Bill Maguire, CIO, Virgin America

Being in the highly competitive airlines space, how critical is IT and

telecom to your company?



Our network is a key component to making everything work. We have a very diverse
infrastructure with many partners providing systems support, therefore making

the network invaluable for success.

What kind of a ticketing system do you have in place? Can you also talk

about the other IT applications deployed in the company?



We use the open source solution Scarab to track all tickets for any issue

that comes to IT. We also use this application for change management. This gives

us a Web-based solution for managing problems, changes and configurations. We

have an extensive list of applications to run the best. They include such

applications as AiRes (our reservation system), AIMS (our flight operations

systems), Great Plains (for finance), and the list goes on.

Can you talk about the networking architecture?



We have an MPLS provided by Verizon Business. And we have a frame relay as a

failover strategy and appropriate security. We have multiple layers of security.

Managing downtimes in IT is a big challenges for the CIOs todaydo you

agree?



Business groups tend to like applications to be available 24x7x365. The

reality is there are windows of time that can be negotiated for appropriate

changes and enhancements. This also permits the IT team to build an

infrastructure that is effective and cost-efficient. There are some applications

that need to be available 24x7 and you can achieve this through careful

planning. Metrics is a key to managing these objectives.

SLAs also play a key role in any IT deployment in your opinion what are

some of the best ways to manage SLAs?



We are very careful about negotiating SLAs. This includes appropriate

metrics that report performance on a monthly basis.

Shrikanth G



shrikanthg@cybermedia.co.in