“We decided on the cloud solution supported by Azure, with SQL as the database and .Net for all the front end developments, because it covered our needs from a global perspective. The Microsoft proposal was a cut above those of its competitors with respect flexibility, functionality, cost, guarantees, resources and partners.”
-Ricard Falomir, Iberia Express CIO
Iberia Express was set up in 2012 as a subsidiary of Iberia, the number one air transport group in Spain and one of the most veteran companies in the world. It currently has 475 employees and operates more than 27,000 flights a year. To control all its online commerce (purchase, flight management, promotions, etc.), Iberia Express needed a new, faster, more functional platform that would better adapt to change and incur fewer costs.
Based on those needs, Iberia Express, accompanied by Birchman Group, has reinvented the way in which it provides service to its customers through the use of .NET technology and Microsoft Azure in developing and rolling out the new website, with excellent results: greater functionality, excellent time to market and an increase in direct sales through the website, which are three times those of last year.
“Iberia Express has been operating in the market for three years, during which we have grown in terms of the number of flights operated and the number of passengers carried. This growth, along with the need to permanently reinvent our customer proposal, has given the company an exceptional cruising speed and the capacity to offer new, differential functionalities at a reasonable cost, which led us to renew our online commercial technological platform”, says Fernando Candela, Iberia Express CEO. In this regard, Ricard Falomir, Iberia Express CIO, assures: “We had a less agile platform that was more complex to manage and maintain, and required enormous economic effort in the event of the slightest change.”
“Our online sales channel, which is critical for the company, did not fully respond to all out functional needs, in terms of time to market or costs; we were undergoing a crucial moment when we had to reinvent ourselves”, Falomir goes on. According to the director, the platform had extremely limited capacities, due to its technological architecture: complex functional validation flows, with no test models or continuous improvement cycles (functionality), etc., and enormous efforts were required with regards to resources for all evolutions and the development setting required lengthy definition and test cycles, which slowed down the time to market, and increased the development cost.
“Before deciding, we considered different alternatives for the cloud and database engine solutions and for the development technology.” says Falomir. Eventually –he continues- “we decided on the cloud solution supported by Azure, with SQL as the database and .Net for all the front end developments, because it covered our needs from a global perspective. The Microsoft proposal was a cut above those of its competitors with respect to five main aspects: flexibility, functionality, cost, guarantees, resources and partners, without forgetting the corporate enrolment of our corporate holding, IAG, with Microsoft.”
Accompanied by the Birchman Group, the company chose to integrate the project – the entire online sales platform www.iberiaexpress.com set up based on full cloud architecture and infrastructure – with Azure to implement and roll out the platform.
“The new website has allowed us to triple direct sales through this channel and save development and infrastructure costs. Moreover, we can now offer new services to our customers in less time.”
-Silvia Mosquera, Iberia Express CCO
