The fledgling discount airline is flying high -- and saving money -- thanks to an IT infrastructure based on open-source apps, inexpensive servers, and outsourcing.
Despite Richard Branson's role as just a minority investor in the discount airline launched last summer, Virgin America, its IT department still lives up to Branson's brash, iconoclastic reputation in the only way that an IT department can: by going open source.
"We have 25 open-source solutions at Virgin America today," said Bill Maguire, Virgin America's CIO.
In fact, 60 percent of Virgin America's IT infrastructure is based on a Linux operating system and a host of other open-source apps running on inexpensive servers. If that isn't enough to make the company's accounting department see green, large swaths of the company's IT work is outsourced.
Millions of Dollars Saved
Maguire estimates that his department has saved the company nearly $6 million in licensing fees and ongoing maintenance fees since he first began setting it up about 18 months ago. His annual IT budget is probably nearly 20 percent less than it would be with off-the-shelf software. And that's not even including the reduced headcount because, as he said, "I don't have a big Oracle ERP application that requires full-time application staff, DBAs, and programmers."
But the real bottom line is, is it working? "The good news is we are flying planes every day and everything is working," said Maguire. He acknowledged that in the world of airline IT, the way he built his IT department is fairly unique, but he added, "the best [proof] is how well it's working for the company."
Virgin America began flying in August, 2007 and, according to Maguire, there have been no outages. The company is up to 700 employees, but the IT staff is holding at 16. Currently, he said, the Web site is handling nearly 650,000 transactions a second and could easily scale up if it had to. "We watch utilization, we watch for the peaks, we know how we're doing," said Maguire. "[The system] gives us great flexibility. If we need to scale up, I can jump in and add it."
In typical open-source fashion, Maguire is a hands-on tech guy who saw the development of Virgin America's IT department from scratch as an opportunity to implement a vision that he has long nurtured. He joined Virgin America in January 2006, right after the airline had applied to the Department of Transportation for permission to fly, and wanted to start building out its IT infrastructure.
"I've been using open source for years," Maguire said. "A lot of the products have matured significantly. I knew this was an opportunity to save money and have a system that's fast, lightweight, and flexible and wouldn't take a lot of people to manage."
Choosing Carefully
Maguire has fairly rigorous standards for which open-source products he chooses. "I don't select products that will put our company at risk," he said. "When we looked for a solution to a business requirement, we would do an in-depth study of the product and what community would be responsible. When we make a decision, we feel comfortable that we're not introducing something that's vulnerable. My goal when I came was to be as smart in solutions as possible."
Smart, and open. From IPTables to BIND to Apache to Tomcat, Maguire's shop takes full advantage of what's out there in the world of open source. He implemented document management with KnowledgeTree, and deems it "phenomenal and incredibly simple. It's really, really cool and all Web-based." It took, he said, about two hours to set up and roll it out to all company departments.
Next Page: More Open-Source Solutions -- and Outsourcing, Too
