Virgin Atlantic's IT director on budget cuts and having fun

How many CIOs can say that their company motto is "having fun"?

That's how Mike Cope sums up life working as IT director at airline Virgin Atlantic.

After five years at British Airways including a stint as CTO, Cope flew the nest to join its comparatively youthful rival just over two years ago.

The jump from British Airways to its young competitor may pose very different challenges for Cope but he says it is a job that is never boring and, most importantly, enjoyable.

"They are very different companies: Virgin is probably about a fifth of the size of British Airways and it's much younger and has a different culture. One of its values is having fun, which I think is quite unusual," he said.

A fun culture it may be but the tech team is serious when it comes to cost-cutting.

Under Cope's stewardship the company is transforming its IT infrastructure to give it an edge in a fiercely competitive market, and one that has already seen several airlines go under as a result of yo-yoing fuel costs coupled with the economic downturn.

As a result of the recession, the airline's tech budget is being curbed with Cope predicting a double-digit reduction in IT spend this year.

"Airlines are very affected by the economic downturn and that is one reason why we need to cut our spend and the number of projects," Cope told silicon.com.

"We are actively looking to renegotiate contracts and consolidate some of our partners because we have a few too many right now."

The savings drive has also prompted the company to schedule the replacement of two legacy datacentres in an effort to shave costs, get more performance out of existing hardware and provide better disaster recovery for its systems.

"We will virtualise all of our datacentre equipment - so where as now we have one instance of Windows per piece of hardware, in the new environment we will probably move up to 10 instances of Windows on one virtualised piece of hardware," Cope said.

"We are looking to double utilisation and reduce the hardware by a factor of four, much of it is end of life anyway and needs replacing so now is the right time to do this."

The leaner datacentres will also help the airline meet its target to cut IT power consumption by at least 20 per cent by the time the datacentres are replaced in the middle of this year.

The need for efficiency will also see Virgin Atlantic move its website away from Sun Solaris to a Linux-based alternative in the first quarter of this year.

The open source system "will be more cost and performance effective", Cope said.

According to the IT director, as well as trimming costs, "the challenge right now is... finding ways to use technology to add value and give the company an edge in a very tough marketplace".

One project that has seen the company use technology to gain an edge is...

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