Hotel group takes on private hosted backend systems to provide strategic operational support
Hotel group takes on private hosted backend systems to provide strategic operational support
UK independent hotel and hospitality company, De Vere Group, has signed a three-year, multimillion deal with Manchester-based IT provider ANS Group to move its corporate back-office IT into the cloud.
The deal has just been named ‘Best New Business Win’ at the CRN Sales & Marketing Awards. And the provider said it believed that De Vere is the first independent UK hotel group to move its corporate IT infrastructure into the cloud.
The agreement will see a private ‘flexpod in the cloud’ solution manage and boost the capacity of the IT systems for the group.
For the last four years, De Vere has used 18 racks stored offsite with Telecity in Manchester. The new managed IT services will see the number of racks stored with Telecity reduce to three. ANS Group will provide 24-hour support and security, effectively acting as an external IT department.
Best-of-breed IT provision
The new infrastructure will provide a flexpod design, using Cisco unified communication services (UCS), Nexus switches, NetApp storage and VMware virtualisation. It will be providing for the needs of 2,500 end-users and will reduce the number of racks in the data centre to just three.
ANS will also build a new Citrix farm to publish the applications to users and will be responsible for the complete migration of the current infrastructure onto the new platform while causing no disruption in service. ANS Group have provided service level agreements (SLAs) for the group to guarantee availability and performance of the data centre over the life of the contract.
Jo Stanford, Group IT director for De Vere Group, said: “We were very impressed with the demonstration of deep understanding of our business, and of the challenges faced generally in the hospitality sector, shown by ANS Group. The key strategic drive for this project and core to this partnership for us is ensuring that we are providing a first-class infrastructure that will allow us to continue to provide excellent service to our customers, especially during the transitional period, however, a significant side benefit will be substantial savings in hosting costs.”
Maximum operational expenditure value
The reported key benefits for De Vere include dramatically reduced physical hardware requirements, the minimisation of their carbon footprint and also the capital expenditure benefits of not needing to keep depreciating, ageing assets on the balance sheet.
Locally sourced data centres were also important to De Vere as part of the agreement. “We have guarantees that our cloud data is within touching distance and that it remains in Europe,” Stanford added.
The boost in storage capacity through the private cloud means that the De Vere customer experience can also be radically enhanced. “All properties are fully centralised using terminal services and as such all business critical systems are hosted centrally. These systems are becoming more intuitive, intelligent and dynamic as a result,” she said.
De Vere’s move into the cloud has been gradual, however, the company plans to complete its migration by the end of 2012.
