Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how travel giant Southwest Airlines is using VMware products to streamline customer service applications.

1. Southwest Airlines Ramps Up Quickly with Virtualization and
IT as a Service
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how travel giant Southwest Airlines is using VMware
products to streamline customer service applications.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: VMware
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
from the VMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here in the week of August 29 to
explore the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure
developments.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your
host throughout this series of VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect
discussions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Here at VMworld, as part of the main keynote address, one company and its
innovative approach to IT has been spotlighted. Southwest Airlines, one of the
best-run companies anywhere, with some 35 straight years of profitability, told its story of how
IT has been transformative and how IT as a service has really worked for them.
Here to tell us more about how Southwest is innovating and adapting with IT as a compelling
strategic differentiator is Bob Young, Vice President of Technology and Chief Technology
Officer at Southwest Airlines.
Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Bob.
Bob Young: Well, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you today.
Gardner: We heard a lot about IT as a service, and unfortunately, a lot of companies face an IT
organization that might be perceived as a little less than service oriented, maybe even for some a
roadblock or a hurdle. How do you think you at Southwest have been able to make IT and keep
IT squarely in the role of enablement?
Young: First off, as everybody should know already, Southwest Air is the customer service
champ in the industry. Taking excellent care of our customers is just as important as filling our
planes with fuel. It’s really what makes us go.
So as we are taking a look and trying to be what travelers want in an airline,
and we are constantly looking for ways to improve Southwest Airlines and
make it better for our customers, that's really where virtualization and IT as a
service comes into play. What we want to be able to do is make IT not say,
"Oh, this is IT versus something else."

2. People want to be able to get on Southwest.com, make a reservation, log on to their Rapid
Rewards or our Loyalty Program, and they want to be able to do it when they want to do it, when
they need to do it, from wherever they are. And it’s just great to be able to provide that service.
We provide that to them at any point in time that they want in a reliable manner. And that's really
what it gets right down to -- to make the functions and the solutions that we provide ubiquitous
so people don’t really need to think about anything other than, "I need to do this and I can do it
now."
At your fingertips
Gardner: I travel quite a bit and it seems to me that things have changed a lot in the last few
years. One of the nice things is that information seems to be at your fingertips more than ever. I
never seem to be out of the loop now as a traveler. I can find out
changes probably as quickly as the folks at the gate.
So how has this transfer of information been possible? How have
you been able to keep up with the demands and the expectations of
the travelers?
Young: One of the things that we like to do at Southwest Airlines is listen to our customers,
listen to what their wants and desires are, and be flexible enough to be able to provide those
solutions.
If we talk about information and the flow of information through applications and services, it
really starts to segment the core technical aspects of that so the customer and our employees
don’t really need to think about it. When they want to get the flight at the gates, the passenger is
on a flight leg, etc., they can go ahead and get that at any moment in time.
Another good example of that is earlier this year we rolled out our new Rapid Rewards 2.0
rogram. It represents a bold and leading way to look at rewards and giving customers what they
want. With this program, we've been able to make it such that we can make any seat available on
any flight for our Rapid Rewards customers for rewards booking, which is unique in the industry.
The other thing it does is allows our current and potential members the flexibility in how they
both earn miles and points and how they use them for rewards -- being able to plan ahead and
allowing them to save some significant points.
The same is true of how we provide IT as a service. What we want to be able to do is provide it
whenever they want it, whenever they need it, at the right cost point, and to meet their needs.
We've got some of the best customers in the world and they like to do things for themselves. We
want to allow them to do that for themselves and be able to provide our employees the same
areas.

3. If you've been on a Southwest flight, you've seen our flight crews, our in-flight team, really trying
to have fun and trying to make Southwest a fun place to work and to be, and we just want to
continue to support that in a number of different ways.
Gardner: You have also had some very significant challenges. You're growing rapidly. Your
Southwest.com website is a crucial and growing part of your revenue stream. You've had
mergers, acquisitions, and integrations as a result of that, and as we just discussed, the
expectations of your consumers, your customers, are ramping up as well -- more data, more
mobile devices, more ways to intercept the business processes that support your overall products
and services.
So with all those requirements, tell me a little bit about the how. How in IT have you been able to
create common infrastructures, reduce redundancy, and then yet still ramp up to meet these
challenging requirements?
Significant volume
Young: As you all know, Southwest.com is a very large travel site, one of the largest in the
industry -- not just airlines, but the travel industry as a whole. Over 80 percent of our customers
and consumers book travel directly on Southwest.com. As you may know, we have fare sales a
couple of times a year, and that can drive a significant volume.
What we've been able to do and how we have been able to meet some of those challenges is
through a number of different VMware products. One of the core products is VMware itself, if
we talk about vSphere, vMotion, etc., to be able to provide that virtualization. You can get a 1-
to-10 virtualization depending on which type of servers and blades you're using, which helps us
on the infrastructure side of the house to maintain that and have the storage, physical, and
electrical capacity in our data centers.
But it also allows us, as we're moving, consolidating, and expanding these different data centers,
to be able to move that virtual machine (VM) seamlessly between points. Then, it doesn’t matter
where it’s running.
That allows us the capacity. So if we have a fare sale and I need to add capacity on some of our
services, it gives our us and our team that run the infrastructure the ability to bring up new
services on new VMs seamlessly. It plugs right into how we're doing things, so that internal
cloud allows us not to experience blips.
It's been a great add for us from a capacity management perspective and being able to get the
right capacity, with the right applications, at the right time. It allows us to manage that in such a
way that it’s transparent to our end-users so they don’t notice any of this is going on in the
background, and the experience is not different.
Gardner: I understand that you're at a fairly high level of virtualization. Is that a place where
you plan to stay? Are you going to pursue higher levels? Where do you expect to go with that?

4. Young: I'll give you a little bit of background. We started our virtualized environments about 18
months ago. We went from a very small amount of virtualization to what we coined our Server
2.0 strategy, which was really the combination of commodity-based hardware blades with
VMware on that.
And that allowed us last year in the first and second quarter to grow from several hundred VMs
to over several thousand, which is where we're at today in the production environment. If you
talk about production, development, and test, production is just one of those environments.
It has allowed us to scale that very rapidly without having to add a thousand physical servers.
And it has been a tremendous benefit for us in managing our power, space, and cooling in the
data center, along with allowing our engineers who are doing the day-to-day work to have a
single way to manage it, deploy, and move stuff around even more automatically. They don’t
have to mess with that anymore, VMware just takes care of the different products that are part of
the VMware Suite.
Gardner: And your confidence, has it risen to the level where you're looking at 70, 80, 90, even
more percent of virtualization? How do you expect to end that journey?
Ready for the evolution
Young: I would love to be at 100 percent virtualized. That would be fantastic. I think
unfortunately we still have some manufacturers and software vendors -- and we call them
vendors, because typically we don’t say partners -- who decide they are not going to support their
software running in the virtualized environment. That can create problems, especially when you
need to keep some of those systems up 24x7, 365, with three nines and a five availability.
We're hoping that changes, but the goal would be to move as much as we can, because if I take a
look at virtualization, we are kind of our internal private cloud. What that’s really doing is
getting us ready for the evolution that’s going to happen over the next, 5, 7, or 10 years, where
you may have applications and data deployed out in a cloud, a virtual private cloud, public cloud
if the security becomes good enough, where you've got to bring all that stuff together.
If you need to have huge amounts of capacity and two applications are not collocated that need
to talk back and forth, you've got to be much more efficient on the calls and the communications
and make that seamless for the customer.
This is giving us the platform to start learning more and start developing those solutions that
don’t need to be collocated in a data center or in one or two data centers, but can really be pushed
wherever it makes sense. That could be from wherever the most efficient data center is from a
green technology perspective, use the least electricity and cooling power, to alternate energy, to
what makes sense at the time of the year.

5. That is a huge add and a huge win for us in the IT community to be able to start utilizing some of
that virtualization and even across physical locations.
Gardner: So as you've ramped up on your virtualization, I imagine you have been able to enjoy
some benefits from that in terms of capital expense, hardware, and energy. How about in some of
the areas around configuration management and policy management. Is there a centralization
feature to this that also is paying dividends?
Young: That’s a huge cornerstone of the suite of tools that we've been able to get through
VMware is being able to deploy custom solutions and even some of the off-the-shelf solutions on
a standard platform, standard operating systems, standard configurations, standard containers for
the web, etc. It allows us to deploy that stuff within minutes, whereas it used to take engineers
manually going to configure each thing separately. That’s been a huge savings for that.
The other thing is, once you get the configuration right and you have it automated, you don’t
have to worry about people taking some human missteps. Those are going to happen, and you've
got to go back and redo something. That elimination of error and the speed at which we can do
that is helping. As you expand your server footprints and the number of VMs and servers you
have without having to add to your staff, you can actually do more with the same number of or
fewer staff.
Gardner: I wonder how you feel about desktop virtualization. Another feature that we've seen in
the field in the marketplace is those that make good use of server virtualization are in a better
position to then take that a step further and extend it out through PC-over-IP and other
approaches to delivering the whole desktop experience. Is that something that you're involved
with or experimenting with? How do you feel about that?
Young: This has been going on and off in the IT industry for the past 10-15 years, if you talk
about Net PCs and some of the other things. What’s really driven us to take a look at it is that
around our environment we can control security on virtual desktops, etc., very clearly, very
quickly and deliver that in a great service.
New mobile devices
The other thing that’s leading to this is, not just what we talked about in security, is the plethora
of brand new mobile devices -- iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Galaxy. HP has a new device.
RIM has a new device. We need to be able to deliver our services in a more ubiquitous manner.
The virtual desktop allows us to go ahead and deliver some of those where I don’t need to
control the hardware. I just control the interface, which can protect our systems virtually, and it’s
really pretty neat.
I was on one of my devices the other day and was able to go in via virtual desktop that was set up
to be able to use some of the core systems without having all that stuff loaded on my machine,
and that was via the Internet. So it worked out phenomenally well.

6. Now, there are some issues that you have to do depending on whether you're doing collocation
and facility, but you can easily get through some of that with the right virtualization setup and
networking.
Gardner: So you have come an awfully long way. You say 18 months ago you were only
embarking on virtualization, but now you're already talking about hybrid clouds and mobile
enablement and wide area network optimization. How is that you have been able to bite off so
much so soon? A lot of people would be intimidated, do more of that crawl-walk-run, with the
emphasis on the crawl and walk parts?
Young: Well, I am very fortunate. I might come up with the vision of where we want to go and
this is where IT is going, and I am very fortunate to have some very good and phenomenal
engineers working on this, working through it, all the issues, all the little challenges that pop up
along the way in order to do this.
It’s what our team would say is pretty cool technology, and it gets them excited about doing
something new and different as well. I've got a couple of managers -- Tim Pilson, Mitch Mitchell
-- and their teams, and some really good people, who actually are here at VMworld.
Jason Norman is one of the people, and Doug Rowland also has been very involved with getting
this rolled out. It’s amazing what a core set of just a few people can do with the right technology,
the right attitude, and passion to get it done. I've just been very impressed with their, what we
call warrior spirit here at Southwest Airlines -- just not giving up, doing what it takes to get it
done, and being able to utilize that with some of the VMware products.
It extends beyond that team. Our development teams use Spring and some other of the VMware
products as well. If we run into an issue, it’s just like VMware on the development side of the
house and product side of the house is really part of our extended team. They take it, they listen,
and they come back with a fix and a patch in literally a day or two, rather than some other
vendors with whom you might wait weeks or months and it might never make it to you.
So I really have got to give credit to the teams that are working with me, my team who gets it
done, and VMware for providing such a great product that the engineers want to use it, can use it,
and can understand it, and make huge amounts of progress in a very short period of time.
Gardner: Well, great. I really enjoyed your presentation on the stage. It’s a very interesting and
compelling story. We've been talking with Southwest Airlines and how they are continuing to
innovate and adapt and using IT as a compelling strategic differentiator.
Our guest has been Bob Young, Vice President of Technology and Chief Technology Officer at
Southwest Airlines. Thanks so much, Bob.
Young: Well, thank you and I hope everybody has a great time here at VMworld.
Gardner: And thanks too to our audience for joining this special podcast that’s coming to you
from the 2011 VMworld Conference in Las Vegas.

7. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of
VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next
time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: VMware
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how travel giant Southwest Airlines is using VMware
products to streamline customer service applications. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC,
2005-2011. All rights reserved.
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