Frontier Airlines

Success at a Glance

The complete overhaul of a major airline Web site is a complex project requiring broad and deep expertise. The challenge includes choosing the right technology architecture, designing compelling content and graphics, managing content and integrating the site with third-party services such as online reservation systems.

Frontier Airlines, which launched an entirely revamped Web site in 2006, is an example of how Sun Professional Services can help make a major Web site redesign successful. The low-fare leader called on Sun consultants to provide the technology architecture for its new Web site and manage its entire overhaul project. Frontier's main objective was to increase the number of online reservations made by its customers. The airline recognized that doing more business online was critical to improving customer service and lowering its distribution costs.

Frontier fixed its goals on increasing its percentage of bookings on the Web from 35 to 50 percent in the first year of the new site's operation—a 43% increase—and then increasing online reservations to 80 percent or more within three years. This business strategy included new advertising and marketing campaigns designed to attract online customers. First, however, the airline needed to overhaul the site to support the projected increase in users. The existing site, which was based on Dell servers and Microsoft .NET software, couldn't scale to keep pace with performance goals. In addition, the look and feel of the old site didn’t capture the excitement of Frontier’s new branding.

Sun Professional Services entered the picture in 2005 when Frontier evaluated dozens of vendors for the project. In keeping with Sun's unique Client Engagement Model, experts from Sun Professional Services engaged Frontier's team early in the sales cycle. From the start, the Sun consultants demonstrated their enterprise Web domain expertise and focused on helping the airline meet its business objectives. The team's accessibility and productive suggestions helped convince Frontier to make Sun the primary technology vendor for the project and entrust Sun Professional Services with end-to-end project management.

Sun Professional Services held a series of meetings with Frontier and its Web design partner, Critical Mass, to plan and design the new Web site. Sun provided the project plan based on a phased implementation that allows Frontier to add new services and steadily support more users without disruption to its Web site. Sun's scalable architecture solution—based on Sun Fire X4100 servers, the Solaris 10 Operating System and the Sun Java Application Platform Suite—enables Frontier to take this incremental approach at a lower total cost of ownership (TCO) than competing solutions. The Sun solution allows Frontier to reach its long-range performance and revenue targets without purchasing additional server hardware.

See the related story about how Sun technology is contributing to the success of the Frontier Airlines Web site.

Sun Professional Services also helped oversee Frontier's development partner, which performed Java development for the site. Sun’s vertical expertise and strong partnership with Sabre Holdings helped Frontier integrate the site with the Sabre online reservation engine. Sun Learning Services showed Frontier how to migrate from .NET to Java by training the IT team with the Sun Java Application Platform Suite and Solaris 10 OS.

As the launch date for the new site approached, Sun Professional Services worked with Frontier to perform load testing. The new site is currently serving 20,000 unique visitors per hour, but bench tests show the Sun servers able to handle up to 80,000. By working with Sun, the airline has launched a flagship Web site designed to delight its customers and support its business objectives--now and in the future.