Intelligent CIO Europe Issue 51 | Page 61

CASE STUDY could involve any of the following : design and planning workshops ; deploying major changes ; negotiating enterprise contracts ; driving strategic change and investment plans ; and spending time with technology , business and product leaders at our UK and European locations . It ’ s a home-based role , but there ’ s lots of travel involved too .

What was behind your decision to work with Rackspace Technology – why did you select it as the technology vendor ?

Firstly , because we ’ d worked with the vendor before , got good results and liked its collaborative culture . And , secondly , because we knew it was well placed to complement our internal talent and help us deliver what we wanted to do in the cloud . Initially , we moved things as they were , but that was never the end game – we were always going to need an engineering solution instead of just a service provider and we knew Rackspace had great pedigree in that area .

How will migrating your applications to the cloud enable you to achieve outstanding business performance ?

There are numerous upsides to this . Migrating has enabled us to scale up and down at pace to meet the significant peaks and troughs in demand that are usual for the travel industry , but which have been massively pronounced as a result of the pandemic . We can also experiment and deliver change at scale and at speed , meaning we deliver solutions to our guests and owners much quicker than we were able to before . We ’ re also able to absorb acquisitions much quicker and with less risk to the business due to the way cloud architecture works .

Can you tell us more about the effects of the pandemic on the tourism industry and how technology has been an enabler for growth and scalability ?

Our investment in customised auto-scaling has enabled us to easily cope with the unprecedented peaks and troughs in demand that have followed every government announcement on COVID and travel over the last 18 months , and therefore make the most of an exceptional year for UK staycations . We ’ re clearly in the business of moving people around and that ’ s been very hard to do over the last few years . The variables were fairly black and white during full lockdown – either you could travel , or you couldn ’ t – it ’ s the stages in between and all the different shades of grey that have presented the greater technical challenge and complexity . Our investment in digital self-service has made it easier for people to find a solution for their specific set of circumstances when the rules have changed and that ’ s really helped from a customer service point of view .

As a front-runner in Europe ’ s tourism industry , what are some of your key priorities for digital innovation ?

Guest and owner experience is always our number one priority . That ’ s why we ’ re investing heavily in new portal platforms , as well as looking at real innovations in yield management to get the best possible outcomes for our owner partners . It doesn ’ t matter if they own one property or 1,000 – we always aim to deliver the best owner experience through technology .

What are some of the benefits you ’ ve experienced since the implementation ?

The ability to scale rapidly in response to a TV ad , or a government announcement , when thousands of people head for the website in a matter of minutes , has been a game-changer for us , particularly when we are only now paying for the compute and bandwidth we are using . It ’ s a much more flexible system and highly cost-effective . Tightly aligning compute resources to demand in this way has already led to a 30 % reduction in web session costs .

How do you plan to evolve over the next 12 months ?

I don ’ t think it ’ s giving too much away to say that we ’ ll be continuing to invest in new products and features , leveraging cloud technology to continually improve the Awaze guest and owner experience . p

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