Corporate travel specialists TravelIT make the move to Microsoft Azure

The challenge

The world of corporate and business travel, and specifically the tools used to enhance efficiencies and drive cost control, is constantly growing and adapting. TravelIT is the forerunner in the field. With over 2,000 corporate and governmental customers who collectively employ more than half a million people, it is the largest player in the corporate travel management platform game in South Africa.

"Our corporate travel technology system makes it easy for big organisations to manage all their travel needs themselves in a single place," explains Barry Painting, the group's CIO. This includes flights, cars, hotels, transfers, forex and more in a single online booking platform. "By putting the widest choice of travel options directly in the customer's hands, we give the customer the power of choice and ensure significant travel savings, all the while ensuring that corporate policies are followed."

Delivering that seamless experience means doing a lot of heavy IT lifting. TravelIT integrates into each client's ERP system and creates a profile for every employee, including loyalty programmes, dietary requirements, booking thresholds and, most importantly, personal information subject to POPIA and GDPR. "This is the most sensitive information we have," says Painting. "When tendering for government and corporate client business, there's a very stringent set of security requirements. We chose Microsoft Azure partly because of all its advanced security features."

The solution

Since its inception in 2012, TravelIT has always been a "Microsoft Shop," developing its application using Microsoft products. In 2019 it decided to move all of its operations to Azure for the additional layers of security the platform provides. When it came to shifting its systems, TravelIT wasted no time in reaching out to BUI.

"Moving TravelIT to Azure was made easier by the way they had constructed their travel platform using existing Microsoft products," explains BUI's Cloud Solutions Architect, Johnson Sheng. "Completing the move to Azure will save TravelIT more money. And it will dramatically increase their resilience, redundancy and efficiency."

The modernisation project was split into three phases:

• First, BUI moves all web servers to Azure Web Apps.
• Next, the firm transitions to running Microsoft SQL as a service rather than a VM.
• Finally, BUI and TravelIT migrate the Microsoft BizTalk application to Logic and Function Apps, the phase with the most exciting potential to go serverless.

Onwards and upwards

The migration itself took place in February 2020, and BUI continues to handle deployment, maintenance and patching alongside the ongoing modernisation work. "Our developers need to focus on building a world-class travel platform, and we wanted someone else to handle the infrastructure," says Painting. "It was obvious that BUI had the credentials to get us where we needed to be."