 from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering AWS re-invent 2018, brought to you by Amazon Web Services, Intel, and their ecosystem partners. Welcome back to Las Vegas. We are live here at AWS re-invent, along with Justin Moore and I'm John Walson. I know when you travel these days, all you want is just, you want it to work, right? We just want to get there. Well, I'll tell you what, Phil Wood from EasyJet wants you to get there as well, as is Matt Leonard from Sentry Link. Gentlemen, glad to have you with us. I appreciate that. EasyJet, a European-based carrier, just north of London, so we're talking about air travel. You are, as we just recently learned, you are a catalyst award winner from Sentry Link. There's a reason for that, and that's a point of distinction. So Matt, if you would maybe take us still a little bit about what EasyJet did to earn that distinction. Sure, yeah, so the catalyst award is an award that we give out in combination with VMware. It's a kind of highlight customers that are doing new and exciting things with regard to digital transformation. We've been a provider of services and a partner with EasyJet for a long time, and they've done some really cool things with regard to services they've provided their end customers, and we play a very, very small part of that. Two exciting things that are my personal favorites with regard to EasyJet is the looking book service. So within the application, if you want to book a new trip, normally you have to type in the airport that you want to go to, and you have to figure out, the time of the airport or the three-digit code. With the EasyJet application, you can upload a picture, and it has intelligence that's used to figure out that picture and what that landmark is, and then what the nearest airport is, so that's pretty exciting. And the second exciting thing within the application is a trip in one tap. So you can basically just kind of dial in how much money do you want to spend for a trip, hit the go button, and literally one tap, it'll recommend a city, a hotel, and a fun and exciting thing that's happening during that duration of time. So for kind of last minute travelers, my family is certainly one of those. We got a free, a period of time, one tap, it'll tell you where to stay, how to get there with EasyJet, and then what's exciting happening within that city. So I could put in, I'd say, I want to spend $300 a ticket, and tap boom, and it'll say you could go to Brussels, you could go to Amsterdam. Absolutely. But you can't make it the Dublin this weekend, right? Yeah. Or whatever. I like that, I love that. That's pretty good. So what has that done for your business then? I mean, in terms of on a micro level, and a macro level first of all, what's it doing in terms of that interface, and what's it mean to your business in general? I mean, as a business, we're 23 years old, so we started very much like a startup, and we kind of came in that low-cost airline bracket. But now what we're renowned for is the convenience, and you've got two examples there where our customers love that because it's a convenient way. You know, they don't have to do lots of searching, you know, they can just take the photograph and they know exactly where they're going to go. And that's really what differentiates us, is that convenience and the customer experience that we offer to all of our customers. I mean, we have a lot of customers, we have 90 million passengers a year, and they come to us because they know that not just do we give great value, but that experience. So what it's done, it's made us grow, and that's literally how we continue to grow, is to expand those customer services, and essentially could be a part of that journey for over half of our kind of tenure as an ally. Yeah, so it sounds like technology is actually right on the edge of driving that value for customers and making things easier. Like just the experience of being able to walk out and take a photo of something and say, I want to go here. I would like to go out and see if I can trick it by taking a photo of the Eiffel Tower out the back here. We'll go try that in a bit. We'll see what happens. I'm confident, I'm confident, yeah? We'll see how it goes. So that's making use of a whole bunch of technology. It's got mobile technology in there, it's got image recognition, it's got machine learning. So what else are you seeing at the show here at AWS? What are some of the technologies that you think will drive the next evolution of things? What's going to win you the next award? I think one of the things I've been really looking around is around data and around the personalization. So the whole, we talk about customer experience, but a whole journey of taking a plane, take a holiday, for example, it's from the moment you book it to the moment you get back and there's so many touchpoints through that and there's so much data that we can take from that. So I've been really interested in looking at how different organizations and how Amazon have been using data. I also think, you know, you can't come to a show like this about looking at machine learning and AI. I mean, we're using aspects of that in how we analyze our data, but that's certainly something that I think is going to change the airline industry moving forward. Ryan, how important is a partnership with someone like CenturyLink in making sure that you get the best use of these technologies? I mean, the fact, I mean, Matt talked about that they have a small part to play, but you've got to understand that every single customer, every single search on our website goes through a network. I mean, in order for us to connect to our customers, be they booking a flight, be they on a flight, we've got to go through a reliable network and the way I describe it, it needs to be effortless. It needs to just work. And you mentioned that right at the beginning. But I also think as well for us to exploit technologies like the cloud, which is what we're starting to invest a lot more into, we need a partner who can help us on that journey. So again, that's where CenturyLink and the partnership we've got has been absolutely crucial. I mean, the things that we're doing with CenturyLink around making sure that we're only paying for our network for what we use, you know, we're an airline, our airports are seasonal. So kind of traditional networks, what you'll end up doing is paying for bandwidth all year when in the winter seasons, if you're not flying there, that's dead money. So I mean, it's simple things like that, but that makes a huge difference towards from a cost-based perspective. And time of day, I assume that affects that as well, right? Absolutely. I mean, clearly in our summer periods, we fly a lot. So our time of day during the summer, there's not that many hours we don't fly. You got a lot of daylight over there, right? Yeah, right. But certainly in winter, you know, where we have our kind of summer destinations, it makes a big, big difference. And that's cost we pass on to the customer as well, which is massively important. Yeah, what is it about the customer that did that? I guess that you don't know. You talk about AI and what that can do for you down the road. How much information or how much data do you think you can extract from the customer to make that experience even better? And what do you need to know about them? And how will CenturyLink help you get there? You need to know everything. I mean, we know that we sell 170 million bacon sandwiches a year. Whether or not that's useful or not. But we know that. There's not many people. That's a lot of bacon. It is a lot. But it means that we know the type of food that our customers want to eat. We know the top destinations. Even knowing how long between booking a flight and actually flying. So we know from a price perspective and from making sure our planes are full or making sure we're not overselling our planes. All of that information, there's just a wealth of data that you're getting out there. And it's not just customers. One of the big factors for us is safety. So we use our data now to analyze maintenance. So we have predictive maintenance around when's the right time to put in spare parts. But also what's the most efficient time so that we're not disrupting the customer? So that actually we may want to bring a maintenance cycle sooner so we can open up more routes for customers to fly when they want to. So it's very hard to answer that question because every day we're coming up with new ideas or new bits of information that at the time we never thought we needed to know but that actually turns into being an absolute crucial part of our offer. Yeah. I mean that's not an unusual thing for most people in a world where there's this much dynamic. Absolutely. And there's this much change going on. So what process do you run through to figure out where should we be looking to find out the next set of optimizations or how do you discover what is the next thing that you should work on? Where does the idea for maybe we should build this app? Where does that come from? I don't think there's one model. I think what's always been at the heart of EasyJet is innovation. And we've always focused on the customer. So we have great loyalty scheme and our customers are very loyal. We have 75% loyalty with our customers which is phenomenal. We get a lot of feedback and that feedback drives a lot of the ideas that we push forward. So I think it's a mixture of our passion, it's a mixture of our experience but I'd say that feedback from the customer that drives a lot of the ideas that we do moving forward. From the CenturyLink perspective, you were designated as the received certification for the MSP designation. What is, I guess, working in the travel business? What does that do or how does that MSP certification translate over to learning about a different industry, about applying different approaches, unique approaches because it's not one size fits all. They have very, very specific challenges that you're trying to address. Yeah, so on a broader sense, our mission with clients like EasyJet and customers interested in the cloud is really to connect, migrate, and then manage their workloads within the cloud. That's really what we're focused on and there's certainly commonalities within verticals but every customer is different and then really assessing what is there, starting with the customer and that's a common thing that I think both EasyJet as well as CenturyLink and certainly Amazon have in common really focused on that customer journey. One of the approaches that we take through a program called CustomerLink is put the customer right in the center of the team and we've applied the agile methodology to that customer engagement process. So we do a standup meeting once every two weeks. We do sprints once every two weeks. A lot of our customers are part of that board that we use to activate the sprint and to define priorities and what actions are. So really kind of pulling the whole team together across different departments, focusing on the customer first and in many cases the customer's customer first, right? A lot of your priorities are driven based on what your customers are after and really make sure that we're working on the right activity in a very lean way, pulling as much waste as possible that aren't contributing to adding value to the customer journey. And then maybe from your side of the fence going forward too. You've mentioned four or five general areas you said we could improve here, we could look at this, we could look at that. How do you prioritize and say okay, let's focus here now and then we'll move on. So if you had to focus now or next 12 months what would that be on? So we've actually just relaunched our strategy and I mean at the heart we are an airline. So our priority is about being kind of number one or number two in all the primary airports. We've got to keep that but we also recognize from the data that the amount of our customers who will book hotels or book kind of further products through some of our partners, that's something that we can actually capitalize on. So we're looking more into holidays now, taking that customer kind of a centricity and how do we make the end-to-end journey for our customers including travel to and from airport including going on the holiday. So that's a priority for us. Continue building our customer loyalty. So as much as we pride ourselves on loyalty we believe there's a lot more you can do. I think the airline loyalty schemes need to be shaken up a little bit more if you look in the retail sector and things like that. They're focusing on different things. It's no longer just a case of air miles. People want kind of speedier boarding or they want a better experience or better seating arrangements. So we're looking at our loyalty. And then also business. You know we talk about we've got really good slots for when we fly planes. And they're slots that are competitive to for business travelers. So that's their three main areas I would say there on business holidays and loyalty. Matt, you're going to be in business for a while. I think you're okay. If you can work on leg room, I'm sold, all right? Matt and Phil, thanks for being with us. Not a problem, thank you. We appreciate the time. Continue here on theCUBE. You're watching our live coverage from Las Vegas at AWS re-invent.