Aer Lingus’ transition to the latest Datalex Direct eCommerce product and certified platform significantly improves operational efficiencies and speed to market for new revenue generating products as well as enabling greater digital retail innovation and a superior guest experience.

Solution

To drive this goal, Aer Lingus made the decision to move to the latest Datalex Direct eCommerce product and certified platform. This move allowed Aer Lingus to leverage new Datalex product innovation at a much faster pace, in parallel with the pace of its business, as well as at lower cost.

The key business motivations underlying the decision to move were to:

• Significantly improve speed to market of new features and releases
• Allow for greater tactical flexibility and faster market reaction time
• Increase revenue from faster implementation of digital retail enhancements and enhance the guest experience with a superior digital value proposition
• Achieve ongoing cost and time savings from operational efficiencies
• Alignment with and opportunity to influence Datalex product roadmap
• Enable Aer Lingus to leverage new digital retail product capabilities at the pace of its business and digital transformation strategy

Results/ Impact

As the first Datalex customer to go-live with the latest version of the Datalex Direct product and certified platform, Aer Lingus is setting the pace for digital retail innovation in its market and is seeing significant value in terms of increased speed to market, cost efficiencies, faster market reaction capability as well as performance and quality improvements.
Some of the key business benefits and results experienced by Aer Lingus include:

• Seamless and Speedy Integration of Platform Releases
  Aer Lingus now has the ability to leverage new Datalex product functionalities, improvements, and fixes at a much faster pace and at a lower cost by keeping abreast of latest product and platform releases in a seamless, smooth and speedy manner. This has significantly increased time to market for Aer Lingus releases, delivering faster implementation of digital retail enhancements.

• Accelerated time to market for new revenue generating product and service offerings enabled by SALT Auto deployments and environments building
  Datalex delivered and enabled SALT for Aer Lingus hosting (Automation for enterprise IT ops, event-driven data center orchestration and the most flexible configuration management for DevOps at scale). This in combination with the Digital Commerce Platform has accelerated time to market for new revenue generating product and services.
  
  

“Our move to the Datalex Certified platform has unlocked many benefits for Aer Lingus. This includes significantly reduced resources and time required to deliver releases and enhancements. We have observed a reduction from 4-5 weeks effort to 20 minutes in many instances.”

• Significant Cost Savings:
  • Aer Lingus has observed that auto deployments alone via SALT have brought installation times down from 4-5 weeks to 2-3 hours for setting up new environments for major feature releases.
  • The product approach has resulted in lower implementation and enablement costs as new product features are readily available to “turn on” and don’t require custom “merging”
  • Removal of the requirement to maintain an Aer Lingus specific version of the Digital Commerce Platform has not only increased speed of release creation and build times, it has also removed the need for large and costly upgrade projects.
    
    
• Access to New Product Features and Roadmap Influence
  With the Datalex transition from platform to a product first, cloud-based strategy, Aer Lingus benefits from incremental product enhancement releases which are much easier and quicker to consume, keeping their digital retail offering at the cutting edge. Aer Lingus can evolve with and consume the Datalex product roadmap enhancements in a timely and cost-efficient manner. Quarterly roadmap sessions also allow Aer Lingus the opportunity to review and influence the Datalex Product Roadmap as it evolves – enabling Aer Lingus to align its digital retail strategy with the ongoing product enhancements in the Datalex roadmap.
  
  
• Continuous Performance Improvements Exceeded Expectations
  A greater than 10% performance improvement has been seen in production with ongoing improvements to security, stability and performance in production of the Aer Lingus eCommerce site. The improvements have significantly exceeded expectations and the target set. Aer Lingus will continually benefit from improvements over time in performance as the product evolves as well as ongoing alignment with industry standards and supporting technology.
  
  
• Production Improvements:
  Following the transition to product, Aer Lingus has seen record low levels of production support tickets and issues – production issues have been brought to zero in terms of any issues or bugs found.
  
  
• Quality Enhancements:
  Quality was further improved leading to shorter UAT cycles and the current zero tickets In Production.
  
  
• Security Advances:
  Continuous update of middleware stack has allowed Aer Lingus to stay up to date and in line with required security compliance and protection, which is a hugely important factor nowadays to prevent exposure to cyberwarfare and security attacks.
  
  
• Greater Control:
  By transitioning to the Datalex Certified Platform, Aer Lingus now has access to new and more sophisticated tools to enable and control their eCommerce offering and solution. With every feature release, Aer Lingus are seeing the benefits of continuous product improvements e.g. new functionality, stability, maintainability, new tools, all ATPCO mandates, new ATPCO category support for flight shopping, enhanced automated deployment, enhanced platform modularity, etc.
  
  
• Support:
  The continuous update of their middleware stack has allowed Aer Lingus to avoid ‘end of life’ and no extended support situations for many of their middleware components as seen previously
  
  

“At Aer Lingus our mission is to enable a guest-focused brand and a digitally-enabled value proposition. Our partnership with the leading digital retail technology provider Datalex is key to making this a reality. Our recent transition to the Datalex product and certified platform means that we can move faster with our digital transformation strategy, prioritising the right digital investments while benefitting from greater cost efficiencies, flexibility and speed to market. With Datalex, we are realising our goal to differentiate Aer Lingus in terms of its digital offering and a frictionless guest experience.”

About Aer Lingus

Aer Lingus (U.K.) Limited is a subsidiary of Aer Lingus Limited, the national airline of Ireland, founded in 1936. Aer Lingus Limited has over 100 routes, flying direct routes from North America to Ireland and onwards to destinations in the UK and Europe, and carries more than 12 million guests per annum. Aer Lingus is a 4-Star airline, awarded by Skytrax, the international air transport rating organisation. Its mission is to become the leading value carrier operating across the North Atlantic enabled by a profitable and sustainable short-haul network, supported by a guest-focused brand and a digitally-enabled value proposition. Aer Lingus is a member of International Airlines Group (IAG), one of the world's largest airline groups.