Virgin Australia's (then Virgin Blue) contract with Accenture subsidiary, Navitaire, for an outsourced booking management system wasn't out of the ordinary. Most of its regional competitors -- including Jetstar, Tiger Airways and AirAsia -- also use the company's products and services. It's one of the only low-cost options in a business that is all about saving pennies. But when a vendor-side hardware failure caused an 11-day outage in 2010, just a year after implementation, Virgin was forced to delay and cancel multiple flights, losing up to $20 million in pre-tax profit.

The airliner foreshadowed court action against Navitaire but, in April 2011, the two organisations reached "mutually satisfactory" terms of agreement. According to Gilbert + Tobin's McGregor, only five per cent of vendor disputes ever reach court, but the story is one of several instances of airline systems outages that can cause havoc to vendor relationships. For Navitaire, the outage had an effect not only on its relationship with Virgin, but also with competitors across the region. Jetstar, though retaining the system, has worked to implement second and third measure contingency plans in the event of such a failure.

Thankfully, Stephen Tame has a plan. Since joining Jetstar in 2004, the CIO has led a policy of outsourcing 100 per cent of the low-cost airline's IT to third parties.

The Qantas subsidiary could hardly be called a start-up anymore, but Tame still only counts five internal staff in his IT team.

The company outsources to a current stable of 12 providers -- seven Australian companies and five Indian firms -- managing the entirety of the company's IT. He's eager to welcome more into the fold, too, with recent moves to push human resources functions to a Cloud solution from SuccessFactors.