"It's always helpful to have a seasoned airline executive at the helm," says The Boyd Group's Sieber. "[Reid] may not be able to run an airline, but he sure as hell knows how not to run one."

Diverse experience is a hallmark of the Virgin team, who are all working out of the airport's official headquarters on Airport Boulevard in Burlingame, California - thanks to more than $US10 million in subsidies and incentives that California and San Francisco offered it to set up shop there.

"What we're trying to do is create the next-generation airline," says CIO Maguire. "We're trying to create an experience where the passenger will say: This flight is going to be cool."

"Very early on, the perception was that we were going to be a no-frills airline [and] that low-cost equals low frills," says Pawlowski. "But we're trying to give people more for their money and elevate the guest experience . . . to the extent that's feasible when you're stuck in a tube at 30,000 feet. More full service. But we won't make the customers pay more for it."

If that turns out to be the case, it will differentiate Virgin America sharply from much of the industry today.

The Frugal CIO

To understand what Reid and his team saw in Maguire, one need only glance at the press release that announced his hiring, highlighting the millions he slashed from the IT budgets of various Silicon Valley software companies.

"When you're a start-up, you don't have a lot of money to do a lot with," says Forrester VP of Travel Research Henry Harteveldt. "You have to do a lot with a little. But airlines are incredibly complex, and you have to be extremely careful about where you put your money."

Every dollar that Maguire [ital]doesn't[end] spend on back-end IT systems that don't provide visible customer value can be funnelled into things that do, like kiosks in the terminal (which Virgin America, unlike JetBlue, will have at launch).

Maguire is getting the most bang for his buck in the infrastructure area. "I'm an expert in designing networks," he says. He started out "doodling with computers" in 1969 and worked his way up to managing the US Postal Service's IT centre in San Mateo, where he was responsible for all aspects of computer operations and where he built his own SAN in 1998. "I can save money by the way I design a company's network infrastructure or negotiate with telcos," says Maguire. And while that may sound less than sexy, he gets as excited about the fact that he can run his data centre more efficiently - by cooling the rack-mounted servers from the top with water-chilled AC units - as he does about the very early implementation of VoIP he oversaw at Legato Systems in 2001. And he's as jazzed about being able to get Verizon to give the start-up a one-year contract (which is less expensive up front than the multiyear norm) as he is about the digital flight deck Virgin will be building into its planes.

"We don't have a ton of money," Maguire explains. "So it's great when the vendors can come to bat for us." The one-year contract with Verizon, for example, will allow him to tie the network rollout to the airline rollout "and save considerable dollars."

A huge financial burden for any IT shop is staffing, and Maguire's tactic here is to right-size his mix of full-time and contract workers. For example, when implementing an application called AIMS to manage flight operations, he brought on a contractor with AIMS expertise for six months and let him go once the implementation was complete. "To get the job done, you have to learn how to balance contractor support versus permanent staff," says Maguire, who plans to operate with just 21 full-time IT employees when Virgin takes off.

A Hard Man with Software

Maguire is exploiting a mixed bag of tricks to cap his software costs - from creative licensing to making the most of open-source tools. Though he won't give away all his secrets, "I try hard to develop licensing patterns that use concurrent users instead of named users, which is what the vendors would rather sell. I like to license by size of server or CPU power," says Maguire, whose contracting savvy may be traced back to the three years he spent in law school before committing to an IT career. "I understand how to size systems and configure utilization so we're not paying gobs more than we need to. That just gets down to knowing your environment."

In fact, nothing gives Maguire more pleasure than exploiting lower-cost technologies. "We don't typically do that in this country," he says. "Take Microsoft or Oracle. They'll spend millions to develop software that we only use 10 percent of. Look at Word. I use a couple of features and that's it. For me, it's always been about how we make this server do more, how we make this application do more."

Virgin America is building its own spam filter, load-balancing solution and change management tools, all based on free open-source code. Maguire estimates he'd have to pay more than $US80,000 for the traditional version of load-balancing software he now uses for free. "Some will argue that you can't get immediate support for these tools if you have a major breakdown, but it's amazing the support these [open-source] communities provide. We get updates to the spam filter every night from the community," he says. "It's way, way awesome."