1. The low-cost airline industry is a competitive one in which travelers compare carriers via third-party pricing engines and
book their tickets online. Customers expect a friendly web experience that gets them where they want to go quickly and,
above all, a good deal. To expand their customer base and create loyalty, airlines must work hard to establish strong links
with their passengers. Their best bet, they are finding, is their website.
“Visual Studio Team Services has helped us embed a number of agile
practices in our development methodology. And because we can deploy
our solution in Azure, we now have an effective and efficient way to set
up a continuous integration and delivery pipeline.”
Juan Carlos Llorente, Head of Development for E-commerce and
Commercial Systems, Iberia Express
Increasing responsiveness with
agile development tools

2. Customer Name: Iberia Express
Industry: Hospitality and Travel
Country or Region: EMEA
Customer Website: www.iberiaexpress.com
Employee Size: 500 employees
Partner Name: Birchman Group
Customer Profile
Iberia Express is a low-cost airline owned by Iberia. It offers short-haul and
medium-haul routes from Madrid, Spain. The airline began operating in
March 2012 and shares its head office with Iberia in Madrid.
A brisk business
When Iberia Express began offering
feeder flights across Europe in 2012, it
knew it needed to be quick on its feet.
For starters, its small IT team needed to
build an e-commerce site that leads new
visitors quickly through the buying funnel
and showcases special offers for returning
customers. Because its marketshare wasn’t
very big, the company set its sights on
a scalable solution that didn’t require
investing in infrastructure so that costs
grew at the same rate as benefits.
For this, Iberia Express needed a modern
platform that was decoupled from the
parent company’s legacy systems and
datacenters, and it needed one fast.
This is why the team chose to build its
online reservation and pricing engine
using Microsoft Visual Studio Team
Services in Microsoft Azure. It would be
compatiable with the .NET technology
and Azure SQL Server database that
the company was already using, and it
would allow the team to directly address
the company’s business objectives.
“We wanted to build the website
environment from scratch so we could
focus on making the interfaces as simple
as possible,” says Juan Carlos Llorente,
Head of Development for E-commerce
and Commercial Systems for Iberia
Express. “By using Visual Studio Team
Services in the Azure platform, we were
able to introduce functionality that wasn’t
available elsewhere. It allowed us to meet
our two goals: to make the commercial
team as fast as possible and to create a
user experience on the website that was
personalized, which is something that
had been challenging with the old site.”
Build better, release better
To develop its online reservation and
pricing engine, Iberia Express reached out
to the Birchman Group, an international
IT consulting firm and Microsoft partner
based in Spain. Birchman developers used
the agile tooling in Visual Studio Team
Services—including repository code,
task-based build, release management,
and package management—to facilitate
planning and version control integration
throughout the entire application lifecycle.
Developers begin by entering the
requirements using the Team Services
backlog, associating the changes in code
to specific work items and then testing,
packaging, and tracking the code to be
deployed with release management.
“Visual Studio Team Services allows
us to more easily manage regular
application deployments and to do so
quickly,” says Llorente. “It has detailed
version tracking and history auditing
for all sprints, so the Quality Assurance
team can easily track the progress of
deployments and manage continuous
integration with the customer team.”
To build standardized modules that can
be leveraged across other projects,
Birchman developers use Visual Studio
Team Services Package Management,
which allows them to package a piece of
code to achieve certain capabilities—
for example, a webpage header or
footer—for use in another instance.
Both Iberia Express and Birchman
developers have access to the Team
Services account, so the working
relationship is transparent. They use team
rooms and dashboards to collaborate,
“The development team can now
use Application Insights to react
before problems are detected in
production, which can affect Iberia
Express’s sales and customer satis-
faction and has a positive impact
on total cost of ownership. Plus,
our new system automates the
entire lifecycle of an application
so we can implement continuous
deployment.”
Agustin Hernandez,
Project Manager, Birchman Group

3. plan, and manage releases. “Team Services
helps us capture product ideas and
break them down into projects, features,
and tasks,” says Llorente. “It allows us
to work with Birchman as a team to
agree on and track prioritization and
estimation tasks, commitment, progress,
and delivery. Senior management also
uses it to track and report on progress.”
Maximizing resources
Birchman built the Iberia Express
e-commerce website with a
microsite-based architecture using Azure
App Service Web Apps. The company uses
API Management to publish, document,
and oversee Iberia Express’s APIs. It also
takes advantage of Stream Analytics and
Application Insights to create telemetry
and track activity for all third-party
API calls. The communication between
applications is supported by Azure
Event Hubs, which collects, transforms,
and stores the data streaming between
applications. “Our pricing engine API
is an important part of how travel
agencies and websites show Iberia Exress
as an option to their customers, says
Llorente. “Using Azure Web Apps and
API Management helps the company
compete in a fast-changing market.”
“With Team Services, we have dramatically
increased the number of tests we can
conduct, which improves the quality
of deliveries and our ability to put into
production what we have developed,” says
Agustin Hernandez, Project Manager at
the Birchman Group. “The development
team can now use Application Insights
to react before problems are detected
in production, which can affect Iberia
Express’s sales and customer satisfaction
and has a positive impact on total cost
of ownership. Plus, our new system
automates the entire lifecycle of an
application, so we can continuously
improve and deploy new features.”
Visual Studio Team Services has helped
Iberia Express minimize the number
of developers needed to run an
environment of its size. Becauase Team

4. Services applies DevOps methodology
for configuring services and deploying in
different environments, the developers
don’t need extensive knowledge about
specific operating systems or database
administrations skills. “The team relies on
the equivalent of one-and-a-half system
administrators for a project that would
otherwise require more than six people,”
says Llorente. “And by building our
environment on the Azure platform, we
can deploy complex features in about half
the time we used to. We don’t need to wait
for bureaucratic processes, the delivery
of equipment, or complex connectivity
requirements, and we can still be
autonomous and self-managed when we
work with third-party service providers.”
Revving the engine
Because the Azure pricing model is
flexible, Iberia Express can scale its
environment up or down on demand.
“Iberia Express now has a system
that won’t choke when it needs to
scale,” says Hernandez. “And the team
doesn’t have to administer changes
all the time to keep up with the
fluctuating demand of the market.”
Because the team uses automatic
provisioning in Azure Resource Manager—
which allows it to deploy, manage, and
monitor all the resources for this solution
as a whole rather than handling them
individually—Iberia Express has reduced
costs for the integration and testing
environments. The team can also access
the resources in just a few minutes and
remove the ones that are not required.
“And we have learned the power of
Power BI,” says Llorente. “Our platform
generates thousands of events every
day with detailed information about
the applications and their status. We
use Azure Tables to store the telemetry
and business events and then Power
BI to construct business dashboards
that report on sales, customer
experience, performance, and so on.”
Today, the Iberia Express ecosystem is
made up of eight front-end applications,
dozens of APIs, and nearly 20 applications
that run in the background. Each
one of these applications has its own
independent lifecycle that permits
bug fixes and the development of new
functionality in an agile way. This is
how Iberia Express continually delivers
value to its customers. “Team Services
has helped us embed a number of
agile practices in our development
methodology,” says Llorente. “And
because we can deploy our solution in
Azure, we now have an effective and
efficient way to set up a continuous
integration and delivery pipeline. All
parties involved, from business to pure
IT, have organically been adopting Team
Services processes and taking advantage
of the tool as a means for collaboration.”
Software
• Microsoft Azure
- Azure API Management
- Azure App Service Web Apps
- Azure Event Hubs
- Azure SQL Server
- Azure Tables
• Microsoft Power BI
• Microsoft Visual Studio Application Insights
• Microsoft Visual Studio Team Services
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN
THIS SUMMARY. Document published August 2016.
“We have learned the power of
Power BI. Our platform generates
thousands of events every day
with detailed information about
the applications and their status.
We use Azure tables to store the
telemetry and business events and
then Power BI to construct busi-
ness dashboards that report on
sales, customer experience, perfor-
mance, and so on.”
Juan Carlos Llorente,
Head of Development for
E-commerce and Commercial
Systems, Iberia Express