Flight Centre New Zealand has deployed an enterprise cloud platform from hyperconverged infrastructure vendor Nutanix to help its travel experts service a growing number of New Zealand residents travelling abroad.
Howard Fyffe, managing director Australia and New Zealand, Nutanix says the Nutanix solution provides enhanced reliability with no single point-of-failure to cost-effectively address the problem of an outdated legacy infrastructure.
Nutanix says with higher availability and performance, travel experts can better identify opportunities for customers, who in turn have faster and more reliable access to Flight Centre services.
According to Statistics New Zealand, international travel by New Zealand residents has increased by more than 83,000 trips between March and August 2016 when compared with the same period in 2015.
{loadposition peter}Flight Centre has more than 200 locations in New Zealand running 900 Citrix-operated virtual desktops. These deliver a range of applications including Flight Centre’s global booking tool used by all travel experts, a corporate retail booking app used by specialists and customers, and travel destination informational apps. These systems are powered by Flight Centre’s two datacentres in Auckland and Hamilton.
Fyffe says that faced with infrastructure that was becoming outdated and a growing desire from customers for new technology, the travel group chose the Nutanix enterprise cloud platform to enhance its IT environment and allow its travel experts to better serve its increasing customer base.
Nutanix says that the two Nutanix clusters—one at each of the datacentres in Auckland and Hamilton – have not only improved performance, but have also shrunk Flight Centre NZ’s datacentre footprint by 80%, and the scale-as-you-go model inherent with Nutanix means that Flight Centre can simply add additional compute and storage resources as needed.
“Our old system had limitations in terms of data availability and in turn our ability to service our customers in the way we wanted,” said Angus Armstrong, Chief Information Officer, Flight Centre NZ.
“With the Nutanix platform, our data is safe and secure and our team can focus on securing the best deals for our customers, giving us a competitive advantage in attracting the growing number of customers travelling from New Zealand and within the country.”