Dubai-based Jumeirah Group has built and managed some of the city’s best-known and celebrated luxury hotels, with some, such as the Burj Al Arab or Emirates Towers, even credited with putting Dubai on the map as a high-end tourism destination.
It now operates dozens of luxury properties across the world, from London to China, and is one of the UAE’s most successful global exports.
Indeed, with the UAE back in high-growth mode, the Jumeirah Group has embarked on a period of rapid expansion, with four up-and-coming projects in the MENA region, 10 in Asia, and another in Europe. To support this growth, the company needs a robust and agile IT department capable of not only delivering services with zero downtime, but being able to scale services quickly when demands peak. This is especially true given that the unit works as a service provider to Jumeirah hotels around the world.
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“The way Jumeirah Group works is that we have group IT, which offers services to all of the other hotels from a technology perspective,” explains Neil Menezes, vice president of IT at Jumeirah Group.
Business challenge
While the business side of Jumeirah Group was on the up, Menezes says that the IT infrastructure was straining under the pressure. The company had started to outgrow its IT department in its current form.
Meanwhile, the group needed a fast time-to-market, which meant delivering services to its business in a matter of a few minutes. And whatever the solution, it was vital that its systems were open and could integrate seamlessly with one another — whatever the technology and vendor selected. This meant that disparate systems needed to come together and speak the same language. The IT team at Jumeirah needed greater flexibility over the range of latest innovations available on the market.
There was another requirement for the deployment, too; it couldn’t affect the guests’ hotel stays. From giving guests seamless internet, swift check-in and check-out, to online bookings and enabling requests for room service, all of this needed to be available at all times without affecting guest user-experience. Zero-downtime was vital so that hotels were able to manage the influx of guests during the festive seasons.
At first, then, the company simply decided that it needed to modernise its data centre — a new core network, some better switching, and modern kit across the board. But, given that the infrastructure was already as virtualised as it reasonably could be — with a private cloud solution and all — it soon became clear that, no matter how new the kit was, the currently favoured architecture wasn’t going to be best-suited to Jumeirah’s growth plans.
“This whole project that we’re talking about started off with something around data-centre modernisation. However, it quickly became obvious that we didn’t just want to refresh the hardware, we wanted to make sure that whatever we brought in provided a solid platform that we could use as a springboard in terms of services that we offer our hotels,” says Menezes.
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