Air Deccan has been growing at a fast pace and presently operates 225 daily flights spanning 51 destinations through 28 aircraft and is still adding. Under these circumstances, how are you coping with technology requirements? What are the challenges that you as a CIO face since your growth outpaces industry average?
Within two years, Air Deccan has grown from one aircraft, two destinations, and 4 flights to 28 aircrafts, 51 destination, and 225 flights. It is definitely a rapid growth, and one of the fastest in the airlines industry. So, we have had to move in the same way in terms of IT infrastructure, providing airfield connectivity to new geographies, upscaling call center for receiving bookings. Redundancies are well in place so that the system keeps running and moves along with the expansion plans. We did foresee growth coming from Captain Gopinath's vision that every Indian should fly and planned across different verticals within IT sector. It was essential for rapid expansion, but we did not lose the stability factor.  

The challenges as a CIO are networking, business continuity management, disaster recovery, and redundancies. And one has to cope with it, as in our industry, we cannot hope to go down even for one hour.

Being a low cost airline, the challenge for Air Deccan is to go for the best technology that can provide high uptime. First, how easy or difficult is it to manage it?  
First, low cost does not signify low quality. Freeware like Linux does not mean low quality. And these are most able softwares and we are expanding fast. So, what is essential is to see whether you are getting a particular service or particular software at a cost that is conservative to the service.

Cost is definitely a major consideration as the aim is to keep the value of ticket as low as possible and every department has to work in terms of cost cutting so is the IT department. In IT, cost is a major factor whether in infrastructure, software, services. We have to identify areas where we can cut cost without affecting efficiency and look for good vendor quality at a reasonable price for each and every item within IT. It is difficult, but a deliberate task as it has to be inbuilt, while designing the system.

Have you outsourced your major activities so that you can focus on new technologies?
We do follow outsource model in connectivity and IT services. For connectivity, we have multiple players. We have also signed annual maintenance contracts with respective vendors. Outsourcing is a good model to follow but it has to be done with due deliberations and with strong SLAs (service level agreement). Each SLA should be a measurable quantity because we believe what you cannot measure, you cannot correct. And measurable quantity should also be quantified. Once, the measurable quantity is in place, one has to see to it that these are monitored on a regular basis.

New technologies that Air Deccan is planning to deploy, which will help in reducing cost and increasing employee productivity?
We do exploit technology to the hilt. For example, our customers can book tickets using GPRS. The GPRS system is integrated with the booking engine so that people having GPRS phones can book through it. In this case, the company has tied up with JiGrahak. Even common persons can book their tickets through SMS and for this it has tied up with ACL Wireless. 

We have Intranet for making communication to the employees as well as communication from employees. We are also automating our operations as it helps us in reducing our manpower requirement. On the connectivity front, we have three levels of redundancies so if one link goes down; other gets activated without any human intervention. We have deployed VSAT in the eastern and central sector where connectivity is poor. 

It seems Air Deccan has a small team of around 40 plus staff taking care of entire IT and telecom requirements as the company believes in lean and mean approach to staffing. How are you managing your activities with such a small workforce? 
We are a lean and mean division with around 42 people and the key lies in remote monitoring and remote access. A highly motivated employee base whereby one can go extra mile to see that everything goes fine further offsets it. We also recruit persons with multitasking skills so that he goes all out to resolve the issues. We outsource certain activities and this helps in keeping the team small. On the technology front, we have good remote monitoring tools, which helps in predicting failures, repairing, and controlling it. 

How would you rate the quality of service provided by telecom service providers? Do service providers deliver as per SLA (service level agreement)? If not what are the areas of improvement for service providers?
SLAs are definitely in place for every vendor. We have been maintaining SLAs from past 2 years and are also improving on it. QoS  is quite satisfactory in terms of uptime, in terms of escalation and resolution. On the SLA front, we get around 99% on leased line and 99.5% on VPN. There are always areas of improvement in terms of uptime, escalation, and resolution and we keep on revising it. And our aim is to move from one nine to two nines, three nines, and so on.

Air Deccan has a wide reach for ticket purchase like mobile phones, call centre, Internet, travel agents, Reliance Webstores, airport ticketing counters and many others. What is the break-up in terms of revenue. How do you ensure consistent service across all channels?
We have opted for multiple booking channels thereby providing redundancy even to passengers so that he can book through SMS, GPRS, call center, Internet, and others. Of the overall revenue,  30% comes from direct web clients, 20% from call centers, 15% from airports and city offices, 5% from SMS and GPRS. We do 100% business through Internet as everybody logs onto Internet for booking tickets.  

To provide consistent service, one has to first, maintain the service and second maintain the surges whenever new announcements are made. For the first, one has to see that the network is always up and there is number of redundancies within the system. Second, for the surges either on the website or call center one has see the volume of the call and duration of the call and bandwidth is scaled accordingly. And one also has to have lot of cushion in place to beef up that requirement. The real challenge is in terms of scaling and fine-tuning as overscaling leads to additional cost and underscaling is not good.       

Presently, your call center operations are outsourced but it seems you are planning one of your own facility in Bangalore. How will it be different from others in terms of technology?
It was outsourced earlier but presently we have our own call center. This is centralized and based in Bangalore and caters to all India and worldwide customers. Presently it is around 104 seats but we plan to expand it to 125 seats. On the technology front we have opted for Concerto's Aspect for complete solution. And call center caters to inbound, outbound, and web client.

It seems you believe in multitasking of bandwidth, which helps to reduce wasted bandwidth, while helping to improve the efficiency of the system? Would you explain multitasking of bandwidth?
Multitasking of bandwidth helps in reducing cost as we are effectively using VSAT bandwidth. Bandwidth is decided not on number of airports, but how many concurrent users are active in a given cycle. So it is dependent on behavior pattern and then bandwidth is distributed accordingly. 

What is so unique about your CRS system and ARMS system? How do you take care of reliability and security issues?
The uniqueness of CRS is it is the first system for any Indian airlines company and Inter Group Technology (IGT) has designed as per nuts and bolts of a low cost airline thereby lowering ticket price by upto $8-10 per ticket. And this is a big amount for low cost airlines.

Even in Airlines Resource Management System (ARMS) focus is on engineering, logistics, operations, and training. All these are different systems but it is totally integrated so that one change and it gets reflected in all the different systems.

Pravin Prashant  
pravinp@cybermedia.co.in