How the cloud is raining cost savings for a travel firm

Business Travels offers travel-related solutions to several corporate and business houses. Established in 1990, the company has a strong market presence among corporates. To retain its leadership, the company wanted to keep pace with changing market dynamics and customer requirements. It was also faced with the challenge of moving up the value chain and strengthening its footprint in the B2B travel space. This was not easy since the competition was way ahead with innovative marketing tools and technologies. Plus, the pressure from the etravel companies further added to its challenges. The company had to put in a lot of money in managing its backend. Making it paperless and accessible from anywhere at any time was the key business need. It was obvious that the company required a robust technology upgrade to achieve its objectives.

SHIFT TO THE CLOUD
The company embarked upon the cloud journey to addressthe challenges that hindered its growth. Creating a P2P portal that could help its customers for all their travel needs was the biggest challenge. “The first challenge was to build a system for the P2P portal. As we are into travel trade, work here is a never ending process. In addition, we were in need of a robust data center with cloud services. We did not have IT infrastructure in our premises when we started,” divulges Sunil Kumar, Manager Systems, Business Travels.

The cloud became the obvious choice for the company since it did not have the bandwidth to hire a huge ITteam to support IT infrastructure on-premise. The company started with the minimum IT staff to embark upon the technology bandwagon. It required constant support 24x7 on the cloud for seamless operations. The company invested in solutions that could help it manage data, save on infrastructure cost, and securely handle its data even in the event of crash or downtime.

FINDING THE CLOUD PROVIDER
The company went on to shortlist technology partners. After much deliberation and assessment of requirements, the company decided to use Ricoh Cloud services. “Ricoh shifted our services in their datacenter with complete manageability, reducing major pain-points. It also reduced our efforts in monitoring and management of entire IT infra by moving it to one centralized location,” says Kumar.

With cloud, the company has gained 24x7 support through the year and has been able to reduce its efforts in managing the infrastructure. The cloud has helped the company with proper data management, by saving cost with virtualization and disaster recovery.

Today, the company is able to deliver quality experience to its corporate customers, even if there is downtime. According to Kumar, Business Travels is able to save at least `2-3 lakh every month after moving to the cloud. “We have saved significantly on the amount we spend every month on IT. Cloud has empowered us to deliver quality experience to our customers,” adds Kumar. Further, the deployment has enabled the firm to streamline processes and monitor projects more effectively.