Managed Services for Highly Dynamic

Airline Website

Transportation | Virgin Atlantic

Virgin Atlantic Airways is one of the largest British airlines, with 35 destinations worldwide serving around

5 million passengers each year. The company is dedicated to providing a simple and thorough customer

experience, covering all stages of interaction with its services, starting from online bookings to the flight

journey itself.

Having such a large customer base and a spread out presence involves a highly dynamic and demanding

business environment. Keeping up with the ever-increasing number of website users prompted Virgin

Atlantic Airways to ensure proper assistance to their back-end process operations.

The airline recognised that having sustained maintenance and support to the website is key to upholding

high service levels, while remaining proactive with regard to possible risks. Having worked with Virgin

Atlantic previously on various projects, iQuest was able to identify and apply the most appropriate and

efficient approach to the airline’s need for back-end support.

The Business Context

Transportation | Virgin Atlantic

Managed Services Case Study

Working in close collaboration with EMC, a

leading provider of IT services, iQuest engaged in

assuring managed services for the airline’s

website.

For more than 8 years, our team has been

providing 24x7 Level 3 support for the VAA’s

main website and for some additional micro-sites

used by customers and staff members.

One of the project’s goals is to develop small and

medium-sized pieces of work, with frequent

releases to the live environment, in order to

create a stable online platform for its users. This

agile approach for the development process

creates a flexible and productive work setting.

iQuest uses a problem management application

in order to access occurring incidents submitted

by customers through the client helpdesk. The

issues are investigated and based on the severity

of the reported problem (critical, high or

standard) our team has a corresponding SLA for

fixing them.

At this stage, iQuest found it extremely useful to

implement a user action tracking framework,

which traces down the user’s interaction with

The Solution

the website, enabling our team to perform a

more thorough incident investigation. There

were no business analyst involved in the process

as our developers together with VAA performed

this role by carrying out in-depth analysis as the

items are implemented.

The VAA website offers a variety of services, such

as flight data caching, flight reservation,

boarding pass printing and online payments. The

interaction with a multitude of systems adds a

layer of complexity to the application and the

hardware structure, along with interesting

challenges in maintenance.

In order to keep up with the growing content

volume and the number of website users, the

iQuest team increased the number of web and

application servers in the live environment, which

also required adjustments to be made to the

platform’s architecture.

Although responsible for Level 3 maintenance

and support activities, iQuest has also been

involved in Level 2 support, helping the L2 team

with numerous environment and architecture

specific problems.

For more than 8 years,

iQuest has been providing

24x7 Level 3 support for the

VAA’s main website,

maintaining the website’s

high availability and

performance.

Transportation | Virgin Atlantic

Managed Services Case Study

Ensuring a satisfying experience to Virgin

Atlantic’s website users meant creating a reliable

environment where both customers and staff

members could perform multiple operations of

any complexity without facing inconveniences.

Maintaining the website’s high availability and

performance was possible by providing various

workarounds in critical situations in order to

avoid code changes or outages.

Gaining such control over the system

environment helped the team considerably

minimise the IT effort.

By using the same team for both maintenance

and support, the knowledge gained in

maintenance was made available for 24x7

support, enabling the team to remain proactive

with regard to possible problems. As a result, the

time spent on support activities was reduced by

solving the technical issues as soon as they arise,

before they could impact the business

environment.

The Business Impact

Due to the improved configurability of the

application, several changes that previously

required time-consuming re-deployments can

now be activated by adjusting reloadable files,

applying database changes or by individual

server restarts. While it increases the productivity

of the platform’s resources, streamlining these

internal processes also reduces operational costs.

Whether proactively identifying potential issues

or leveraging best practices to solve the already

occurring incidents, succeeding to minimise

service disruption and website outages on a

regular basis testifies to a stable and reliable

online platform.

Virgin Atlantic Airways’ strong and dynamic

online presence depends on well-run back-end

operations. Benefiting from a unique

combination of a fast and proactive suite of

managed services, VAA’s website is able to

perform at its best, capitalising on the long term

value of technical and business efficiency.

Key Benefits:

Reduced time spent on support

activities with 18.5%

Reduced solution time for incidents

by 15%

Enhanced logging and

reporting

Stable and reliable online

platform

Copyright 2015, iQuest Group. All rights reserved. All rights reserved. No part of this document may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,

transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the express written permission from

iQuest. All other product names, service marks, and trademarks mentioned herein are trademarks of their respective owners.

iQuest is an independent, global IT services and solutions provider that for more than 17 years has been delivering

first-class software solutions to leading companies in Life Sciences, Telecom, Transportation, Financial Services, and

Energy. With a growing international presence, iQuest provides a full range of software development services,

integration services, and software products, all of which rely on the latest commerce, cloud, big data, and analytics

platforms.

Headquartered in Germany, iQuest currently employs more than 600 people, distributed across delivery centers in

Romania, as well as local and affiliate offices in Europe, the US and Asia.

www.iquestgroup.com

About iQuest

Founded in 1984, Virgin Atlantic Airways is a part of the Virgin Group and is the second largest long-distance British

airway company, operating flights to and from the largest cities in the world.

With a fleet size of over 39 aircraft, Virgin Atlantic serves over 35 destinations worldwide, covering remote cities

such as Las Vegas, Cape Town, Hong Kong or Shanghai. The airline carries more than 5.4 million passengers

annually, establishing itself as one of the world’s leading airlines serving the world’s biggest cities.

www.virgin-atlantic.com

About Virgin Atlantic

For more information on this project, please contact:

claudiu.anghel@iquestgroup.com