The JetBlue story

While many of the major airlines have struggled in the past couple years JetBlue Airways continues to grow. The airline, which features leather seats with free satellite TV for every passenger, reported operating revenue of $635 million for 2002, a 98% increase over the $320 million it reported a year earlier. In the first quarter this year, operating revenue jumped nearly 63% over the same quarter in 2002.

How does it do it? There are a number of reasons but one of them is a technology savvy CIO.  JetBlue CIO Jeff Cohen says the company was adding servers as fast as its business could grow. “A bell went off in my mind about six months ago,” Cohen says. “I could just see that I was going to be faced with server consolidation at some point. So I thought, ‘Why don’t we start by taking some of our mission critical applications and putting them on scale-up vs. scale-out servers.’“

JetBlue decided to scrap dozens of commodity servers and install Unisys’ ES7000 servers, which are modular Windows-based boxes that include self-monitoring and self-healing software. Some of the ES7000s JetBlue deployed are new hybrid machines that include 32-bit and 64-bit processors, as well as PCI-blade appliances in a single box. It’s all running on Windows 2003 Server Datacenter Edition.

The airline’s 760 reservations agents, for example, work from home on voice over IP phones – and have been for more than three years. Every single one of the company’s nearly 5,000 employees – JetBlue calls them crew members – have e-mail. All of the pilots have laptop computers in the cockpit, which give them up-to-date access to airplane metrics and electronic flight manuals.

There’s a lot more to this story by Jennifer Mears and Phil Hochmuth.  Read more at: https://www.nwfusion.com/news/2003/0609jetblue.html