My first real experience with a computer was in 1985. I was 15 years old. Some of my classmates had bought Amiga computers for playing games. I bought a 20MB computer and used it to do calculations and homework. When I went to college, I needed ways to make money and I learned about Microsoft Access databases—and that you could make money with them.

On the one hand, we have a highly decentralized infrastructure, with 3,500 PCs and notebooks in 50 countries and 120 locations worldwide. On the other hand, we're consolidating that infrastructure, which was based on the infrastructure of Swissair and Crossair, the two companies that formed SWISS.

For the past few years, it's all been about bringing costs down to acceptable levels wherever we can. That's not just a challenge for us in IT, but for our entire business, where we had to turn a $1 billion loss into a profit. We continue to face pressure from low-price carriers to reduce our unit costs. Another big challenge is the integration of SWISS into the Lufthansa Group.

One of the centerpieces of our turnaround is our expertise in yield and revenue management, which is all about forecasting and demand optimization. When you go to our Web site—www.swiss.com—to look for a specific flight, we've already predicted what flight you'll want and what you're willing to pay for the seat.

IT needs to be an enabler for any decision taken at SWISS. For example, when management decided we should become a member of the STAR Alliance, we had to put the functionality in place to make that a reality—quickly. When you go to a SWISS office, you have to be able to book any flight on any STAR Alliance member. IT made that happen.

Given our competition and our fast-moving environment, we have to be very quick in delivering solutions. So when we choose a technology solution, it has to be one that enables us to meet business requirements with very little time to market. And we still have a lot of legacy systems here, so any new solution has to work with those systems, too.

Mostly, to be honest, I rely on my team. We have a culture to challenge each other, to learn what we're really thinking. We want to be early adopters but not first movers, so we watch the market closely. We use external consultants and we use our business colleagues—all major IT decisions are made jointly with the management.

We use almost everything that's available—Windows, UNIX, host systems, and some Linux. We have a lot of legacy host systems that we're moving away from over time. The driver for us isn't primarily the technology—it's the application. We've outsourced our IT operation and our partners can handle almost any technology. We're flexible.

Reliability was one of the reasons we decided to outsource our infrastructure. We concluded that we didn't have the critical size needed to justify the expense of a high availability infrastructure. We turned to outsourcers who could provide that reliability more cost-effectively. And we manage the reliability through our service delivery organization.

We're not a big user of open source, to be honest. We have a content management system on Linux, which we're moving to Windows. We have a few applications—such as fleet management—on Linux. It's maybe 10 or 15 applications out of 150, and about 2.5 percent of our IT spend.

STAR Alliance.