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CloudBolt Creates Unified Cloud Interface for IHG
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - API Integration & Management
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- System Integration
The Challenge
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) utilizes four different public clouds due to the size and complexity of their IT infrastructure. They wanted the flexibility of multiple public clouds to use the optimal environment for each workload and to protect themselves against price increases and instabilities in any one public cloud. They had been using VMware's vRealize Automation for managing VMware servers, but it did not provide support for the public clouds that they needed. Furthermore, they found vRA to be extremely time-consuming to maintain, with upgrades requiring a multi-month process and a large professional services cost. The process of installing multi-server, multi-tier apps on any one of these public clouds was onerous and required the administrator to use multiple different interfaces.
About The Customer
InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) is an English multinational hotels company headquartered in Denham, UK. IHG has more than 5,000 hotels and nearly 750,000 guest rooms in almost 100 countries around the world. Its brands include Candlewood Suites, Crowne Plaza, Even, Holiday Inn, Holiday Inn Express, Hotel Indigo, Hualuxe, InterContinental and Staybridge Suites. IHG has an annual revenue of over $1.8 billion and employs more than 7,300 people. The company is listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol IHG.
The Solution
CloudBolt provided IHG with a single user interface and API through which they can now deploy complex apps to any of the four public clouds they use, manage these apps and their constituent servers over the course of their lifecycle, and automate their business policies and best practices surrounding server deployment and management. Their IT group has built blueprints in CloudBolt for deploying 40+ node Apache Hadoop clusters to the public cloud. After being deployed, these services can be scaled up and down from CloudBolt, and eventually decommissioned. Since CloudBolt has native Chef Enterprise integration, they are able to perform these tasks without the end user needing to separately work in the Chef UI.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit