Case study: To advance Ryanair's digital infrastructure and services

Ryanair is Europe’s largest airline, connecting over 240 destinations in more than 40 countries.

The challenge

Recognising its status as a top website destination in several European countries, Ryanair initiated an ambitious programme to advance its digital infrastructure and services to be best in class. The plan involved the development and growth of the company’s internal technology organisation while also requiring assistance from third party partners.

The solution

Ryanair engaged a small number of technology partners to add expertise and capacity.

Sonalake was selected for its software design and development credentials, working on the delivery of travel applications to digitise the user journey of Ryanair's customer base. A successful trial was followed by the establishment of dedicated scrum teams, seamlessly working with Ryanair’s core engineering teams in Dublin, Madrid and Wroclaw.

Several software development technologies were applied together with QA expertise, delivering upon a range of market leading applications. The combined teams worked to evolve distributed engineering practices to a highly efficient level, while growing an excellent collaborative culture which made the project extremely popular with Sonalake engineers.

The result

Ryanair successfully accelerated its transformational technology delivery program, modernising its digital infrastructure and enabling an excellent user journey for its customer base.

In the process, it also significantly grew its software engineering organisation while augmenting this with external partners to deliver the modernisation at pace, creating a support ecosystem for ongoing collaboration as needed.

The delivery of customer engagement applications with contemporary software technologies and UX design has contributed significantly to Ryanair's ongoing financial success as Europe’s biggest airline with a leading web presence.