OREANDA-NEWS. November 14, 2013. WhenShangri-La Hotels and Resorts, one of the world's premier hotel companies, needed to migrate its online IT infrastructure and assets, it chose a Verizon cloud computing solution.

The Hong Kong-based company has more than 80 hotels and more than 34,000 rooms, which it either owns or manages, or both, under the Shangri-La brand. The company is expanding rapidly, with upcoming projects in mainland China, India, Mongolia, the Philippines, Qatar, Sri Lanka and the United Kingdom.

The customer experience is a key focus area for Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, which has “hospitality from the heart” as its hallmark. The company decided to centralize its IT infrastructure to better align its processes and systems in support of its customers, with a particular focus on its website and guest reservations system.

Due to the flexible nature of the hospitality industry, the company decided to look to a cloud-based solution, which would enable it to leverage additional capacity on demand during peak booking periods. The challenge was to identify an organization that could offer service on a global basis to support Shangri-La’s global expansion plans – and one that could also achieve a tight, eight-week migration window, necessary to fit in with business demands.

Michael Leong, Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts vice president-digital marketing, said: “Our website is our window on the world, and our reservations system a critical customer touch point. We handle hundreds of thousands of page views and guest bookings on a daily basis, coming both direct and through the travel trade. So it was of paramount importance that our service migration was seamless, without any interruption to service availability.”

Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts chose Verizon due to its proven ability to deliver a highly scalable, secure and efficient cloud environment, and the company’s global reach and expertise. Verizon was also a known quantity to Shangri-La Hotels and Resorts, as it already provided global network infrastructure services and support.

Verizon’s professional services team collaborated closely with the internal IT team throughout an intensive migration planning and delivery process to safeguard against business disruptions by ensuring that critical systems such as reservations and back-office applications would be available and fully operational throughout the transition. This comprehensive planning and review process was critical to the project’s success.

David Kim, Verizon’s regional vice president of strategic cloud and security services, said: “Our history of successful teaming with Shangri-La Hotels meant Verizon was an obvious choice for this critical project. The cloud is still an unproven area for many businesses, but increasingly, forward-thinking organizations like Shangri-La are realizing the benefits it can bring to their business infrastructure. Our team was meticulous, leaving no stone unturned as we planned for and executed the migration. It’s this attention to detail which differentiates us from the competition, and which is critical for our customers’ success.”