Monday Sep 16, 2024
Monday Sep 16, 2024
Thursday, 2 October 2014 00:00 - - {{hitsCtrl.values.hits}}
Expolanka Holdings PLC Head of Group IT Asitha Kaggoda (centre) and Senior Manager IT Projects Ajantha Warusawithana (right) with H One CEO Samath Fernando
Akquasun – whose network currently spans across four continents and 11 destinations – recently claimed Asia’s fastest-growing destination management company title at the World Travel Awards 2012.
The company aims to register more aggressive growth and add to its list of awards and recognition by extending application access to thousands of travel agents, tour operators and event specialists around the world.
This move will allow for direct inquiry logging, freeing up Akquasun agents to focus on competitive responses.
It will also allow for scalability during seasonal travel periods such that computing resources can be increased to guarantee peak performance of the application even during periods of significantly high demand.
Expolanka Head of Group IT Asitha Kaggoda said, “Our globally-situated agents require centralised operations and be able to respond to inquiries quickly from across our DMC network. Delays and downtime result in lost business. Agents will simply not log in to the application to make inquiries again. This Azure-based application is our edge.
“Azure ensures speed and business continuity, which are key to staying ahead of our competition. It also adopts cutting-edge security measures, while allowing for simplified IT management. Lastly, Azure’s pay-as-you-go model makes business sense. We don’t have to make heavy investments for future needs. We can scale up IT resources in-line with the business.”
With over 57% of Fortune 500 companies as its customers, Microsoft Azure is the only major cloud platform ranked by Gartner as an industry leader for both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Azure allows organisations to quickly build, deploy and manage applications – using any language, tool or framework – across a global network of Microsoft-managed datacentres.
Azure can quickly scale up or down to match demand, so you only pay for what you use. Per-minute billing on infrastructure services like compute, storage and bandwidth means customers can manage performance and budgets.
Azure delivers a 99.95% compute service-level agreement (SLA) and provides built-in software patching, network load balancing, high-availability features and 24x7 technical support.
Speaking further, Kaggoda said, “Expolanka’s Cloud Deployment Partner, H One supported us throughout our journey with testing, professional methodologies, and the Azure implementation, which took place within a one week period. After conducting initial usage sizing with Microsoft tools, H One’s expert technical team was able to monitor platform utilisation closely and reduce resource costs incurred by the company – through the cloud, by 50% which is a significant savings with real business impact.”
Discussing Expolanka’s tech focus, Kaggoda said “We are proud to be a cloud pioneer. And as part of our cloud roadmap, we will soon host our award-winning travel agency, Classic Travels’ next generation e-commerce application suite on Azure to enable customers to interact with us more efficiently and conveniently.”
H One CEO, Samath Fernando said, “H One is thrilled to be Expolanka’s preferred cloud partner and IT advisor, and we look forward to realising more technology firsts with the Group. We believe cloud is the future, and have built our name on our strong, regionally-recognised cloud practice with investments in testing beds, extensive R & D on Azure workloads, and a highly skilled ‘Cloud Team’ of engineers for our enterprise customers. We have enabled many of the nation’s leading enterprises – over 19,000 users – with cloud-based productivity and collaboration tools. With Azure we can give organisations even greater flexibility and capacity with anywhere access to their business-critical applications.” Since its inception in 2008 H One has earned a reputation for empowering clients with the most innovative technology solutions. A full-service vendor, H One is also a Microsoft Tier One Partner and a leading Large Account Reseller serving the largest number of Enterprise Agreement customers in Sri Lanka. H One has regional presence in Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, Thailand and Vietnam.
