Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines picks Citrix to consolidate cloud and mobile data centre operations

Cruise line firm improves customer service with data centre upgrade

Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines has deployed Citrix cloud and mobile infrastructure in order to provide a faster, more reliable IT system for its call-centre employees across the world.

The rollout has enabled the company to lower the cost of its existing data centre operations, while also providing the ability to rapidly provision new call centres based upon business requirements.

The cruise firm offers passengers trips to regions ranging from Alaska to the Mediterranean to the Arabian Gulf and to China. The global nature of the company's operations therefore means that the company has call centres spread across different continents in order to meet demand.

Prior to the Citrix deployment, each Royal Caribbean call centre required its own data centre in order to be provided with autonomous IT services, an approach that was costly and difficult to manage because it didn't provide staff with the right workspace in which to do their jobs.

However, the introduction of NetScaler, CloudBridge and XenDesktop tools from Citrix has enabled the organisation to consolidate all its services into one data centre.

This has enabled Royal Caribbean to speed up access to information in a mobile workspace, helping call centre staff to more efficiently handle guest-reservation inquiries, boosting productivity.

"Our call centres provide one of the most important sources of revenue for the company," said Jeanine Graham-Bellamy, director of infrastructure for Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines Ltd.

"It is critical to provide our agents with all the information and resources our guests need, so they can answer questions and connect our customers with services efficiently and seamlessly," she continued.

"Our Citrix solution combines the strengths of NetScaler, CloudBridge and XenDesktop to deliver a fast, responsive workspace to our call centre agents, helping us provide great customer service," Graham-Bellamy added.

The deployment of NetScaler from Citrix enabled Royal Caribbean to provide global load-balancing, network optimisation and troubleshooting capabilities that made it possible to consolidate the core infrastructure into two data centres.

Meanwhile, CloudBridge was used to accelerate application and desktop delivery for XenDesktop, a deployment that enabled Royal Caribbean to reduce bandwidth consumption, a move that has provided call centre agents with fast and reliable access to all the information they require to handle guest reservation enquiries.

Medway Council is also a Citrix customer and Moira Bragg, head of ICT, previously told Computing how deploying Citrix enabled the local government authority to upgrade and virtualise its IT estate.