Cruise Line Sails Ahead with Cost-Saving Integrations

Our Client 

In business for more than 50 years, our client is one of the top cruise line systems (CLS) in the world by passenger count. It prides itself on being an innovator in providing world-class hospitality. 

Challenge 

The COVID-19 pandemic devastated the cruise business, and although it is making a comeback, cruising as a whole is part of a larger, very competitive vacation industry. In light of both the pandemic and overall competition, CLS consistently looks for new ways to cut costs and improve service – with one area of focus being integration of its enterprise IT platforms. A recent example was the initiative to standardize CLS’s reservation system interface, making integration with its travel partners easier and less expensive. Prolifics continually works with CLS to find and implement new, cost-saving integration projects. Together, our ongoing challenge is to identify solutions that help CLS progress on their integration modernization journey – including getting CLS cloud ready. 

Action 

CLS has held many standalone licenses for a variety of IBM integration products, including IIB, DataPower and MQ. Prolifics has provided a significant amount of integration assistance for those applications, which are associated with multiple areas of CLS business and brands. As these product renewals came due, Prolifics used our in-depth knowledge of IBM product licensing to convert standalone licenses to bundles within IBM’s Cloud Pak for Integration hybrid platform. CLS will be able to effectively leverage the options with the Cloud Pak for future growth, services, and financing. As an IBM Premier Partner, we were able to negotiate discounted rates on the Cloud Pak on behalf of CLS. 

Result 

Our negotiated rate discounts and service incentives saved CLS close to $1.5 million.  

A large part of the Cloud Pak licensing includes migrating CLS’s current DataPower appliances to virtual machines (VMs). By helping CLS with this implementation, the company will run multiple operating systems on a single physical server, saving costs by shutting down two data centers. 

Debbie Marcet, the Prolifics Account Executive who works extensively with CLS, said, “Everything that they’re doing from an integration perspective is really all about cost savings and efficiencies. That’s really what it’s about. This integration spans across all of the different areas of their business and across multiple brands. They’re moving to a more modern architecture with Cloud Pak for Integration and eventually to containers, and it’s going to drive efficiency and ultimately more cost-saving- for them.”