The Aer Lingus Model: A Potential Future of SaaS?

As with any new invention, the initial prototype rarely matches the finished design. Every process, invention, and idea must undergo an inherent process of refinement. The same is true of technology. As the field of cloud computing goes through this process of refinement, different services have begun to manifest in unexpected but entirely pragmatic ways. SaaS, or Software as a Service, shows particular growth, especially in the case of Irish airliner Aer Lingus. Instead of using SaaS internally to provide employees with the software to carry out business, Aer Lingus has effectively used SaaS to empower its customer base and expand the company’s services.

Aer Lingus initially needed to find a cost-effective way to allow customers to book reservations online without impacting the company’s bandwidth costs. Because customer demand would be much heavier at certain periods than others, the flexibility of SaaS was a natural solution. Aer Lingus began working with iPlanit, a development partner of Microsoft Azure, to develop their own SaaS application. Instead of simply reducing costs, Aer Lingus also wanted to develop an entirely new set of services that would allow its customers to browse through an interactive route map, instead of a static Point A to Point B listing. Using Microsoft Azure’s PaaS platform, iPlanit developed software that allows customers to book reservations by clicking directly on a map.

What is striking about Aer Lingus’s SaaS development is how the technology has opened up the possibility of dramatically reducing not only Aer Lingus’s software and bandwidth costs, but also its overall administrative overhead. Although some administration will always be necessary to handle customer service issues, by turning over the majority of booking and change requests to software operated directly by the customers, Aer Lingus has effectively turned its customers into administrators, in a way that is both visually appealing and cost-effective.

Hypothetically, one could imagine that the final design implementation of SaaS could eventually become the new customer interface. Practically any industry has the capability to put the majority of its administrative service functions online, allowing customers to serve themselves. Of course, Aer Lingus’s interactive route map software is still relatively new, and jumping too far ahead in speculation is always ill-advised. Like any new technology, cloud computing is still in a discovery process of how best to suit the needs of those who use it on a regular basis.

It is safe to say that cloud computing represents an entirely new infrastructure model, replacing traditional office models in terms of how functions are carried out. Much in the way that companies often hire accounting firms or lawyers to handle specific financial or legal issues, SaaS cloud computing may become the default way to handle administrative customer issues.