Conversation with Virtuoso, a Liquid Computing Customer

I recently had the opportunity to communicate with Joel Chaplin, CIO at Virtuoso, a Liquid Computing customer, and thought you'd like to read a bit about that conversation. By the way, I posted Liquid Computing and the dynamic datacenter back in March 2009.

Please introduce your company and your role

Virtuoso is a luxury travel network that comprises over 300 agencies with over 6,000 elite travel specialists, and more than 1,000 travel providers and destinations worldwide.  Through our web-based service, we connect suppliers with specialists who sell complete travel experiences to their high end clientele.  As the CIO, I’m responsible for building and managing the underlying technology platform to deliver these services in alignment with Virtuoso’s business priorities.

What are you doing that needed this type of technology?

Our plan is to grow revenue significantly in the next five years while at the same time reducing our operating costs, and we needed a technology platform that could simultaneously support both objectives.  In conducting an internal assessment we found that our existing infrastructure, which consisted of an assortment of servers and networking from multiple vendors, was becoming increasingly costly to operate and manage. As a result we decided to undergo a complete IT modernization effort, establishing a platform from which we could scale our services and reduce operating costs as our membership expanded.

What products did you consider before making a selection?

We were already using HP and evaluated their BladeSystem c-Class servers, but found that they wouldn’t allow us to meet our business objectives.  When compared to LiquidIQ, HP’s system was more expensive and would also be more difficult and time-consuming to deploy and manage.  We considered Cisco but didn’t evaluate the system as it wasn’t yet available.

Why did you select LiquidIQ?

LiquidIQ won out because they offered the same consolidation advantages as competitive solutions and also significantly reduced our administrative costs, resulting in a higher total ROI.   LiquidIQ also met our requirements for stability and reliability, and could be deployed quickly in support of our aggressive launch deadlines.

With LiquidIQ our administrators can quickly build a server for any environment - whether virtual or physical - in a matter of minutes.  Now they just select from existing images, such as Windows 2008 or Red Hat Linux, and deploy them to build new servers or reconfigure existing ones.  We’re also using the capability to implement a disaster recovery solution, since we can easily replicate our entire infrastructure configuration to a secondary site.

What tangible benefits can you name that have come through the use of this product?

As a result of moving to LiquidIQ we’ve reduced operating costs by as much as 80 percent from reductions in footprint, power consumption and administrative overhead.  The increased administrative efficiency means we’ll be able to support the continued growth of our service our lean, existing staff.

What advice would you offer others facing similar challenges?

It’s obviously important to focus on the needs of the business when making IT decisions.  Without that perspective it’s easy to get stuck using the same technologies and processes even when they’re no longer supporting business objectives. As is the case with cloud computing and virtualization, unified computing requires companies to make some changes in how they operate, but for Virtuoso the benefits to the bottom line were substantial and the upfront investment quickly paid for itself.