For a service provider running mission-critical, high-availability services, the right IT operating model is critical, Andrew Wilson, senior managing director of Accenture Infrastructure Outsourcing, said in a Cube interview at EMCworld 2013. “There is the potential for anarchy if you run in a non-industrial way.” That means that “your command, control, management, and upgrade processes, your configuration, and all those important elements … need to be rock solid along with the technology you’re running on….” See an overview of The Cube’s coverage of EMCworld 2013 and link to all the recorded interviews here.

“We deliver complex change programs that carry a business to new levels of operation, leveraging what technology can now deliver,” he told SiliconAngle Founder/CEO John Furrier and Wikibon.org Co-founder/Chief Analyst David Vellante. Navitaire, Accenture’s private cloud service for low-cost airlines, which Wilson runs, is a case in point.

“Low cost doesn’t mean small,” Wilson said. Navitaire supports clients in 30 countries worldwide with a complete end-to-end customer-facing business operations platform out of three major production locations. It uses a hybrid of multi-tenant virtualized and un-virtualized servers and runs entirely on EMC storage. It is highly configurable and very flexible to meet the fast-changing needs of its clients.

Navitaire’s platform covers the entire customer-facing operation of the airline from self-service, public cloud passenger booking, passenger check-in either via public cloud or kiosks connected directly to Navitaire, bag checking, boarding, and flight dispatch. That means that “if the Navitaire engine performs badly or isn’t there, the entire airline’s lost.”

And any problem is magnified because of the huge visibility under which the industry operates. “It’s … very challenging and demanding, and … any form of disruption is immediately on television.” And a client’s needs can change hugely week-to-week due to the stiff competition throughout the industry.

One of the most innovative parts of Navitaire is that it can stand up different combinations of servers to support the very rapid changes in the airlines’ business and sales behavior. Clients will do sales in which they promote very aggressive discounting through social media including Twitter and Facebook and want to sell out their seat inventory quickly. That might double or quadruple customer demand, and Navitaire has to respond smoothly without any glitches that could lose bookings or, worse, get adverse publicity for the airline. Then when the sale is over that airline’s demand will drop back to half or a quarter of what it was. Through all that Navitaire has to maintain service for all its other clients worldwide.

A Close partnership with EMC

To do that, it needs a platform with maximum flexibility. It has built that on virtualization and standardization, so that the staff can work with homogeneous blocks of infrastructure that all look and function in very similar ways. A close partnership with EMC is a key part of that strategy.

Before standardizing on EMC storage, “we had a more anarchic environment that had grown up organically as clients had grown,” Wilson said. “We created a consolidation and convergence in code & releases, environments, & in configuration parameters.” As part of that it  standardized on VMAX for all its storage and has been very happy with the result. Since then, it has seen zero interruptions due to storage problems. “EMC is knocking it out of the park on availability.”

That, he said is paying off. “The environment is operable, it’s maintainable, the cost of ownership is good. I can see very much improved response times, improved fail-over times on databases, I can see batch improvements, I can see complex analytical queries running 60%-90% faster. That delivers business value with improvements all over the enterprise.”

Navitaire partners with EMC in other areas as well, and particularly in bringing new technologies into its environment to provide new services to customers as quickly as possible. It looks to EMC consulting to provide new technical skills that it will not immediately have in its own permanent staffing. And it looks to EMC for a roadmap toward increased virtualization of the overall environment.

A software-led infrastructure “means I can respond more quickly to a rapidly changing market.” Important upgrades can be installed across the production environment including the highly analytical data reporting environment that clients depend on and DR environments without interrupting service. It means he can provision rapidly changing development environments to bring new functionality to clients faster. It means he can bring the fault-tolerance of the storage system to new areas of the infrastructure such as firewalls and load balancers.

At EMCworld, he said, he was learning important parts of EMC’s roadmap to bring that sotware-led technology to more parts of the technology infrastructure of Navitaire and other EMC clients.

“Virtualization of the whole data center is the future because it’s going to allow me to scale the whole infrastructure, not just storage compute, in a linear manner. That is powerful.”