Travel agency STA Travel is moving most of its IT
infrastructure into a managed, outsourced datacentre. The
infrastructure migration is part of STA's efforts to combat the
high IT complexity and cost that had crept into the organisation
over the past decade.
Ross Milburn, head of operations at STA Travel, said the company
is currently supported by a combination of Linux, Unix and
Microsoft IIS servers, with each division across the world having
chosen its own IT system.
The company, which has offices in 90 countries, competes with
web-based travel agents and, for competitive reasons, wanted to
revamp and standardise its web operations.
STA Travel has signed a six-year, £6m deal with managed service
provider Savvis to consolidate and centralise its IT infrastructure
at Savvis' datacentre near Reading.
The first phase of the project, worth £1.2m, is to move all of
the hardware that supports the regional websites into Savvis'
hosted datacentre. This began at the end of 2005 and will be
completed by the end of this year.
In December, STA Travel migrated its UK, US, Australian and web
systems, and it went live with Canada last week. Other
English-speaking markets will follow this summer, and the rest of
the globe by the end of the year.
As well as the systems that support the website, STA Travel is
planning to migrate its finance system, Reddot web content
management system, and sales incentive system.
"The consolidation will allow us to reduce our computing and
storage resources. Outsourcing our critical IT infrastructure will
enable us to manage peaks in consumer demand more effectively and
allow us to focus on our core business," said Milburn.
To mitigate the risk of downtime during the migration, STA
Travel is moving one division at a time to the Reading
datacentre.
"We are making sure we are not removing the functionality and
tools and technology that staff have available. The only downtime
we have had is when we migrated a global system - a big bang - two
years ago," said Milburn. "I am keen not to repeat the
experience."