Creating a Springboard™ to Azure Cloud

With 820 hotels in the UK and over 80,000 rooms in great locations, Whitbread is the owner of Premier Inn, the UK’s biggest hotel brand, and has a growing presence in Germany, offering quality accommodation at affordable prices. It also has a portfolio of bars and restaurants, including Beefeater with 140 locations. The company employs 30,000 people in hotels and restaurants across the UK, serving over five million customers every month.

Whitbread wanted to move from its traditional data centre to a more flexible cloud platform. Its overarching objectives were to reduce costs, increase agility, deliver new services faster and contribute to sustainability goals. It needed to find the right partner to move to the new environment safely and quickly.

Whitbread selected Fujitsu, an existing strategic IT partner which already provided data centre hosting, network and end user computing services. Fujitsu previously demonstrated future-oriented thinking, laying the path for a new way of working. This, combined with Fujitsu’s cloud expertise, and Tier 1 partnerships made it the natural choice.

The challenge was to migrate existing applications to the new Microsoft Azure environment without business disruption. This involved close alignment between Whitbread and the Fujitsu cloud services team to ensure a seamless migration. Careful planning and close collaboration have therefore been critical to the success of this ambitious project.

Fujitsu deployed its Cloud Management Service FCMS, including Fujitsu Springboard™ for Azure: an accelerated approach to cloud adoption, management and governance, to enable Whitbread to navigate complexity. It provides an open, transparent and agile migration path with a clearly defined landing zone, outlining the policies and standards across architecture, security and governance.

By incorporating automation as well as integrating with Microsoft’s Azure Migration and Modernisation Programme, the Fujitsu approach made the transition seamless. Fujitsu also controlled risk by breaking the project down into smaller increments with strictly defined guardrails.

“Fujitsu’s approach with Springboard™ for Azure has been game changing. Working as one team across Fujitsu, Whitbread and Microsoft has given us a cloud platform that enables migration to a modern and more sustainable environment. This is our first step to achieving modern and agile ways of working with greater visibility across our infrastructure and applications,” says Simon Maddock, Head of Infrastructure at Whitbread. Fujitsu is now undertaking a broader application assessment to ensure the right roadmaps are developed for the remaining line of business applications.

Whitbread has now successfully transitioned to a robust IT platform with transparent governance, visibility of operations, cost control and faster time to market. New outlets can be integrated faster, and innovations introduced more rapidly. Ultimately, this means Whitbread can provide a better experience for guests and improved customer service.

At the same time, the ability to use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to provision and manage resources enables standardisation and agility. The new environment also significantly improves the visibility of expenditure and monitoring of business systems.

Microsoft Azure Cloud is more sustainable and efficient than the traditional data centre, helping Whitbread meet its green targets. Fujitsu and Whitbread are now at the start of their digital transformation journey, working together to deliver growth and sustainability via innovation. This opportunity lays the foundation for further projects. All delivered by the Fujitsu Springboard™ for Azure process and Fujitsu Cloud Managed Service.