Bill Gates' Worst Nightmare

Posted by: Steve Hamm on July 25

When established companies contemplate making a major change in the way they use technology, they start with a legacy of equipment, software, business processes, and employees that makes it very difficult to do anything very quickly. On the other hand, today’s startups have a blank sheet of paper to write on. They can stretch for the ideal—learning from all of the mistakes of the past and designing something new from the ground up. That’s what Bill Maguire is getting to do in his role as the chief information officer for this country’s newest airline, Virgin America. When Virgin America kicks off operations on Aug. 8, Maguire will have just 16 employees in the IT department. Everything else will be done by outsourcing companies and software-as-a-service outfits. And, naturally, he’ll be using a lot of open source software. Bill Maguire is Bill Gates’ worst nightmare.

Virgin companies are known for outsourcing to the max and focusing on what they do best, but Maguire says he was given free reign when he took the CIO job in January 06. His bosses told him they wanted to build a new reservation system, which is a big job, but Maguire thought he could do it without a large staff by tapping outsourcing, open-source software, and SAAS--all of which are now mature and proven phenomena.

Helped by Indian programming specialist NIIT, Maguire built the new booking engine with open-source components. It plugs into the TravelPort reservation engine, which is SAAS. CSS handles remote datacenter management from India at night and on weekends. For interactive voice response, Maguire tapped Tuvox--another SAAS provider. He has a small customer service call center in California, but that's backed up by call-center outsourcer Arise, whose agents operate from their own homes. Says Maguire: "People just pass out when they hear what we're doing. They go, 'What!?'"

I can imagine that Gates would have something a little sharper to say about that.

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