Holiday Extras turns IT from a ‘no’ department to a ‘yes’ department with cloud

Grazed from ComputerWeekly. Author: Archana Venkatraman.

IT is seen not just as a business enabler, but also as a division that can help the business identify new revenue streams. So when IT was becoming a limiting factor at Holiday Extras, a UK travel add-ons service provider, its IT team knew it had to act fast. Holiday Extras provides add-on travel services, such as airport hotel bookings, parking and insurance services to British holidaymakers. Its most critical business application is its website.

The company’s in-house datacentre, which has been operational since its launch in 1983, powered its web applications, television campaigns and business operations. It was a regular facility full with blade servers, firewall infrastructure, load balancers and massive infrastructure around its web system…

However, Holiday Extras head of IT Damien Turner says in 2011 his team had noticed IT was consistently problematic. While all the different divisions of the company had big, innovative and creative ideas to move the business forward, when it came to them asking for new hardware and software services to power those ideas, the IT team were rarely able to say "yes"…

Read more from the soruce @ http://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240227819/Holiday-Extras-turns-IT-from-a-no-department-to-a-yes-department-with-cloud