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Case study

The challenge

Whitbread is a British multinational hotel and restaurant company, a hospitality business leader and the owner of one of the UK's biggest hotel brands with a growing presence in the UK and Germany. It has aggressive plans to expand its business footprint in the UK and Europe while optimizing IT spend through technology transformation, greater customer and employee experience and reduced total cost of ownership (TCO).

However, a heterogeneous mix of integrations, a lack of governance around integration platform, limited enterprise integration platform (EIP) capability, skill gaps, delivery issues and redundant software resulted in higher capex and Opex costs and impeded Whitbread’s technology transformation journey—ultimately impacting the customer and employee experience and operational efficiency. Whitbread engaged Cognizant to support the modernization of its integration discipline with the goal of turning integration into a strategic, well-governed enterprise discipline across its business.

Our approach

In view of Whitbread’s challenges, goals and transformation aspirations, Cognizant undertook a project comprising:

  • Setting up an integration competency center (ICC) and evangelizing an integration service delivery and governance engine
  • Setting up a Microsoft Azure-based EIP, leveraging Azure integration services that were future-proofed and could scale to Whitbread’s growth and transformation demands
  • Migrating the integrations to the newly set up EIP in a record time of six months. This demonstrated the functioning of ICC, the agility, scalability, and time to market attributes of the EIP, yielding significant license and service cost savings
  • Developing an operational model for an ICC for delivering and supporting the transformation needs of multi-cloud integration, cloud migration and software as a service (SaaS) platform integration throughout the lifecycle
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A foundation for future business growth and differentiation

Whitbread had a strong, differentiated business model and a clear plan for international expansion but needed to integrate applications seamlessly and at scale in support of its growth objectives. Working with Cognizant, it implemented a single, enterprise-wide integration platform with a robust governance wrapper, enabling it to successfully implement its technology transformation initiatives while optimizing its IT total cost of ownership. The ICC and EIP give Whitbread the agility and flexibility to adapt to changing market conditions, capitalize on new opportunities and provide a great customer and employee experience.

6 months

record timescale for migration to Microsoft Azure integration services

275+

complex API operations delivered to date

4.5 million

daily API calls supported