Booking bonanza!

Rackspace Technology recently completed an engagement with Switchfly, a leading travel loyalty, rewards, and packaging solution for airlines, financial service companies, and HR Tech Rewards & Recognition vendors. Working closely with the Switchfly team, Rackspace Technology was able to successfully migrate the organization to Amazon Web Services (AWS), allowing them to maintain constant uptime and achieve a 4x improvement in agent booking retrieval time.

Founded in 2003, Denver-based Switchfly connects all aspects of travel – from flights and hotels to car rentals, traveler support, customer loyalty, and employee rewards programs – into one seamless experience that integrates with rewards and loyalty platforms. As a leader in the travel rewards industry, Switchfly processes roughly $3 billion in bookings annually.

“Rackspace Technology was able to help us achieve our objective of eliminating data centers and modernizing our tech stack selectively to ensure that we hit our aggressive timeline,” said Ed Estabrook, Chief Technology Officer, Switchfly. “As to performance of the application, pulling up an agent booking, which happens every time someone calls, went from 20 seconds down to five seconds. Bringing down that response time was incredibly powerful.”

Because Switchfly's primary focuses are constant uptime and rapid uptime, a high degree of responsiveness is critical to customer success. The company also needed a solution that could allow for future expansion and ease the addition of new services and features without making changes to a monolithic application. Switchfly had to decide whether it wanted to re-commit to on-premises hardware management or move to a cloud environment through the AWS Migration Acceleration Program (MAP), a comprehensive and proven cloud migration program based upon AWS’s experience on migrating thousands of enterprise customers to the cloud. Migration became the priority.

The migration, led by Rackspace Technology, included 20 clients, 70 services, 700 servers and 16 terabytes of data to modern tech stack running on AWS, including Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS), a collection of managed services that makes it simple to set up, operate, and scale databases in the cloud. This migration also freed the performance of the application for certain activities that had previously been bound by Switchfly’s own infrastructure. Switchfly also used Rackspace Optimizer+ to reduce costs.

“We are proud to have helped Switchfly adopt the significantly faster and more resilient Amazon RDS managed database solution,” said Vikram Reddy Kosanam Director, Data Services Delivery, Rackspace Technology. “We were also able to help them successfully migrate their clients and determine the right amount of computing power, saving money through Rackspace Optimizer+.”