Luxury hotel group De Vere moves to private cloud

Luxury hotel group De Vere is preparing to migrate its e-commerce solution to a private cloud with the help of managed services provider Claranet.

Claranet will provide the hotel chain with a dedicated virtual hosting solution that will support and manage its web sites and e-commerce strategy. De Vere hopes the service will drive traffic to its web site and boost revenue.

The decision to move the company site to a private cloud came after it experienced overwhelming traffic following an online promotion last year, which saw the company offer 10,000 rooms for £10 each on 10 October 2010 at 10pm.

The website buckled under the surge in traffic, prompting the group to engage in talks with Claranet, which had already been managing its wide area network.

Although we did a cross-sense check with other providers, essentially we trusted [Claranet] because we had an ongoing relationship with it. The implementation needed to be seamless as the systems cannot go down at any time because there is always revenue going through them. The greatest benefit for us is the ability to flex up all our e-commerce strategy. A lot of the discussions on cloud are around cost savings and efficiency, but for us, it was more about driving revenue. Jo Stanford, Group IT Director, De Vere Group

As a result of the implementation, De Vere will no longer need to pay for under-utilised machines or risk overloading servers in the event of unpredicted demand.