Client Profile
$1.75B global owner and operator of timeshare resorts and hotels around the world. With a well-known points-based program, client runs more than 60 resorts with over 400,000 owners and members, employing more than 10,000 people. This corporation stands for its high standards, which made it the most admired hospitality company in the world.
Business Challenge
The client’s reservations system was antiquated and becoming difficult to maintain, in addition to its incompatibility for integration with other systems. The need to update was two-fold: replace an obsolete reservations system while also incorporating elements to facilitate web and digital capabilities for booking purposes.
The back-end systems were outsourced and hosted into three datacenters. The production systems were hosted on one vendor datacenter, who also managed their infrastructure, while the other two were mostly used for development/test and disaster recovery.
The organization was facing multiple challenges with their current
provider in terms of service:
- Poor response time, leading to business delays and limited decision-making
- Inconsistent use of security processes and tools intended for monitoring and controls
- Minimal innovation applied to improve services
Additionally, the service costs were exorbitantly high and ineffective. Whenever adding a new system or platform was considered, the customer had to face high upfront and monthly costs from the managed services provider to purchase expensive and large hardware components to support the platform for future growth, even if the future growth was undetermined.
The company was looking to host their platforms in a manner that would provide increased agility, better support and an improved cost model.
Solution & Approach
Auxis was engaged to design and quote a new reservations system running on the Amazon Web Services ‘AWS’ cloud.
Platform requirements were evaluated to design a cloud platform in conjunction with the internal teams and the vendor, including AWS and other third-party services. A high focus on security was maintained to ensure a robust solution for the customer.
Throughout the course of the engagement, AWS database architects were on-hand educating the customer on the system’s services, advantages and limitations to ensure full transparency and understanding. A testing environment was created with the CloudFormation Opsworks templates, EC2 and RDS instances, and AWS services (i.e. Route53, SNS, SES, etc.) to also help the customer’s IT team familiarize itself with the AWS platform and its components.
Results
Auxis successfully designed and priced a cloud platform with the following potential benefits:
- Reduced costs – ability to reduce costs by approximately 30% from using a typical data center and hardware purchases