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Technology specialist oobe is navigating tourism giant Flight Centre through the migration of its Australian-based Citrix platform into the Microsoft Azure cloud.
As part of the cloud migration, Flight Centre will also transfer key business platforms to Azure, expecting to wrap up the two-part project by the end of July.
Flight Centre has a history of deploying Citrix technologies, traditionally deploying and managing them in-house, and more recently, using a service provider like oobe to provide the required expertise to architect, deploy, support and manage the solution.
With the planned deployment in Azure, Flight Centre will shift from a traditionally deployed and managed Citrix platform to the Citrix Virtual Apps and Desktop service, part of the Citrix Cloud product suite. The shift to this platform-as-a-service (PaaS) will provide Flight Centre with an evergreen platform.
To kickstart the project, the Microsoft Gold and Citrix Platinum partner commenced a multiple-phase proof-of-concept that identified a number of efficiencies should Flight Centre transition from its existing deployment to Azure.
The first step to realising these efficiencies was the design of Flight Centre’s Citrix Cloud platform in its Asia Pacific – South region and the development of an equivalent digital workspace solution in Azure.
This will place one of Flight Centre’s largest end user computing (EUC) workloads within Azure, supporting over 2,000 active users, and will become an enabler for future workloads, further emphasising Flight Centre’s heavy reliance on digital workspaces for employees.
Despite the reduction in travel, Flight Centre’s staff have remained busy, managing more than $1 billion worth of travel refunds, and helping thousands of consumers rearrange travel plans.
Convinced by the process in February 2021, Flight Centre awarded the production design and rollout into Azure to oobe, which will come to fruition in the next four months.
Jarred Foley, oobe QLD state manager, said Flight Centre was one of the original clients it partnered with in 2016 when it launched its Brisbane office.
“We have gone from helping them with initial tactical solutions, to more strategic solution development and delivery, and have been supporting them in the EUC and Citrix space for close to five years,” Foley said.
“oobe has a great team that supports Flight Centre, and we stuck by them in the height of the pandemic in 2020, helping drive efficiency and cost savings in order to reach their targets even prior to this initiative.
“When people said it couldn’t be done, we helped Flight Centre transform applications that were never meant to run in the public cloud. This next evolution of their digital workspace platform will be the culmination of those years of hard work and will be a primary enabler for Flight Centre to attain value and efficiency from its transition to Microsoft 365 and Citrix Cloud.”
Stuart Kilduff, oobe CEO, said that, drawing on experience supporting 1,000 plus seat organisations in the government and corporate sectors, it knew the migration from Flight Centre’s existing traditional Citrix platform to Azure with Citrix Cloud would serve new features and functionality to help streamline and optimise future delivery and presentation methods through an improved end-user experience and an evergreen control plane.
“Like many organisations in the travel industry, the COVID-19 global pandemic has dramatically impacted Flight Centre and saw a need to look at all areas of its business, including its IT infrastructure,” Kilduff added. “We were confident that the migration would drive further efficiencies and drastically improve the end-user experience. So confident in fact that we covered much of the cost of our personnel to conduct the proof of concept.”
