Budget airline easyJet is planning to useMicrosoft Azureto allow its ground staff to upgrade
customers' seats or pay for excess baggage from mobile
terminals.
The airline aims to reduce the number of fixed airport desks it
needs to operate.
Airport operators charge airlines for each desk, such as the
ticketing desk and the check-in desk, each of which requires a
separate mainframe terminal. Each desk means a new queue.
The programme, dubbed Halo, will use a virtual private network
based on 3G or Wi-Fi to plug mobile devices into the Azure cloud on
the internet.
The airline's ground crew will be able to connect directly to
easyJet's core business applications to provide additional services
for customers, without the need for queues.
In Phase 1a, due to start in October 2009, ground staff equipped
with mobile devices will be provided with applications that support
aircraft boarding processes and payment processing.
Phase 1b, expected in January/February 2010, will extend the
application suite to include check-in and, shortly thereafter,
retail functions such as buying tickets and customer services like
last-minute amendments.
"Ultimately we aim for a full suite of operational, retail and
CRM applications," said Bert Craven, enterprise architect at
easyJet.
Azure provides the link from the internet into the datacentre.
Craven said, "Azure will provide a thin but very important tier in
the overall architecture.
"Azure will make our services visible to devices scattered
across Europe in a secure, reliable and cost-effective way."
Azure will simplify rolling out new application services and a
revamp version of easyJet.com, due to go live in the next
month.
"The great benefit Azure provides us is that we can take these
services and expose them on the Azure Service Bus with little more
than a configuration change. We won't have to build a new
high-availability service platform in our DMZ, or make firewall
configuration changes or deploy lots of new servers," said
Craven.