KP - Project

Cloud Technologies and Visit Orlando The Background Orlando is the vacation capital of the world, hosting over 50 million visitors both domestically and

internationally every year. Presently it is ranked as number two as a travel destination in the United

States, second to Las Vegas, and beating out Chicago and New York City for the third and fourth spots

respectively. Each year, millions of visitors come to the destination, spending money and generating

funds for the area through the Tourist Development Tax (TDT) collected on hotel rooms, car rentals,

attractions, etc.

Visit Orlando, Inc., formerly known as the Orlando Convention and Visitors Bureau, which employs 300+

staff, is a Destination marketing Organization responsible for promoting the destination within the

markets outlined above. Different methods are used to promote the destination such as digital

advertising campaigns, ad sales, media buys, printed material, website promotion, drop shipping and

direct mail publications to name but a few items.

The organization receives funding through various sources such as a portion of the TDT collected by the

city, membership dues for the companies that choose to purchase memberships with the organization,

etc. With approximately 1,800 members. All said, the organization has approximately a $50M annual

operating budget that is largely dedicated to the marketing efforts to promote the destination and

members of the organization.

Presently the organization houses much of their IT resources internally and employs asmall IT staff to

support them. Network infrastructure is in the Microsoft stack both for servers as well as desktops. This

includes platforms such as Active Directory services, Microsoft Exchange for email, and Microsoft

Dynamics GP for the finance system. All database systems presently in place are powered with

Microsoft SQL Server, though some are using 2005 and others 2008, all Standard Edition. Desktop

systems are leveraging Windows 7 on PCs. At this time, all servers are physical, and various boxes exist

for development and test environments.

Membership for the organization is managed using an industry specific / proprietary CRM solution

known as Destination 3000 (D3) by SMI, Inc. Because of Visit Orlando’s position within the industry,

they have been able to influence SMI’s product development and have implemented several customized

features and capabilities unique to their organization which has allowed for improved business

operations, but has severely limited their ability to upgrade the platform as they are on a separate

development branch from the current commercial version.

Due to the heavy reliance on the internet and the web, Visit Orlando has a small web development team

in house that is working on a custom CMS to manage several different web properties. The websites are

developed using Cold Fusion, and a Microsoft SQL Server back end. In total, the web presence as a

whole services upwards of about 3 million page views a day. With such a load, Visit Orlando has chosen

to host the production website through a third party, and has chosen Rackspace to fill this need.

Presently the website is housed across 5 physical web servers in a load balanced, high availability

configuration.

The websites also displays member directory information online, and does this through a series of ETL

jobs from the D3 system into the website SQL server. There is a contractual obligation that prevents

direct connectivity of any systems to the D3 server, requiring all data used in external systems to be first

extracted and then integrated into its destination. Additionally, the site license requirement for D3 only

allows for a single instance of the software to be installed at the corporate office, requiring a secure SSL

VPN tunnel to be in place between the Visit Orlando corporate office and the Rackspace hosted

environment.

Visit Orlando also partners very closely with several well-known theme parks such as Disney, Universal

Studios, and SeaWorld. As part of this arrangement, as well as with many other members, Visit Orlando

sells theme park attraction tickets with an online e-commerce presence currently hosted in the

Rackspace environment. A recent audit has revealed, however, the current shopping cart solution has

fallen out of support with the vendor and is not PCI compliant, requiring that the solution be replaced.

The current solution also integrates with the current POS system at the Visit Orlando Visitor Center (a

“brick and mortar” storefront in the Orlando area) in order to properly account for ticket sales,

inventory, and proper financial reconciliation.

The Request Due to an influx of stimulus money, Visit Orlando is now positioned to invest in their technical

infrastructure and has decided to pursue virtualization and cloud technologies for some of their systems.

They have selected three key areas to employ virtualization and cloud resources.

The first is the public facing web presence at Rackspace. There is interest in perform a physical-to-

virtual (P to V) migration of the current web servers, leveraging the cloud facilities that Rackspace offers

from their IaaS service.

The second is their local corporate office, looking to review the core server infrastructure currently

housing their Active Directory and Exchange services, considering a SaaS implementation to address

email.

The final effort is to consider replacing their Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform

leveraging internal IT resources to use a PaaS offering to address their needs.

The Assignment Please refer to Canvas for specific details on the assignments throughout the course, as this use case will

be used throughout the duration of our course.

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