Qantas flies with Akamai for website performance

In the competitive airline industry, website availability and performance are vital

Qantas Airways manager for enterprise solutions, Brad Tate

Comments

Consistent user experience

The Akamai technology automatically detects when the airline’s origin server is not responding and displays an alternative, failover site to visitors. Once the server is back online, Akamai switches back to normal content delivery.

Qantas incorporates a lot Web application logic into its site to provide customers with a rich online experience and functionality. Its failover site, on the other hand, has a different look and feel. Customers can still access the site and buy tickets — thanks to a partnership with transaction processing firm, Amadeus — but they may not, for example, be able to apply for the Frequent Flyer program.

Tate and his team are now looking at ways to shift some of its in-house logic into the Cloud so that they can configure the failover site and improve the customer experience.

One of the risks of such a strategy is the difficulty of testing. At the moment, the risk is relatively low and is largely offset by Akamai’s transparency.

“The more functionality we put in, the more it will become an issue for us; it is challenging to get Akamai working well in a test environment because it is, by its nature, an Internet entity,” Tate says.

In the end, the decision will be based on value and the ability to service customers.

The goals

Minimise capital expenses for short- and long-term infrastructure investments.
Improve performance — best possible performance for customers regardless of location.
Ensure uptime — the solution must be able to deliver the site without fail.

The solutions