Interactive bills itself as ‘Australia’s largest privately owned and operated IT services business,’ and worked with travel agent Flight Centre to outsource its IT function and enable business transformation in August, signalling a shift from co-location to managed services.

Flight Centre tasked Interactive with the end-to-end responsibility over the data centre environment and legacy compute from IBM and Cisco, as well as Dell Storage and CommVault backup.

John Hanna, Director of Cloud and Managed Services, Interactive said of the deal: “This partnership represents an incredible opportunity for our organisation to expand its work with Flight Centre. It is the largest migration in the Australian travel industry, an industry known for management of a substantial amount of data.”

“Every organisation is pushing IT for more value – from their investments in people and their infrastructure. What we have been able to achieve is a solution enabling companies like Flight Centre to produce more with less.”

Through the process, Flight Centre is freeing up resources – such as mind power and capital – and says it is ‘gaining more flexibility to enable their business to grow and evolve as they need without being locked into a permanent hardware contract.’

Interactive has had a long standing business relationship with Flight Centre over the past 12 years, and clearly, this positioned the IT services company well to manage a project of this scale and size.

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Peter Wataman, Chief Information Officer at Flight Centre mirrored Hanna’s sentiments: “A project of this size is not undertaken without a solid foundation of trust.

“Our potential to innovate was being held back by the time and resources spent on an in-house infrastructure. We had difficulties enabling the businesses rapid growth in new markets and areas, without constantly revisiting our infrastructure solution.

"Interactive offered us a scalable platform, which has given us more agility and flexibility to ensure our IT services are delivering what the business needs as it needs it, even pre-empting change in some instances. We are excited about this journey and how IT will continue to transform Flight Centre as a business.”

It’s clearly a game changing move for Flight Centre, with Interactive proudly boasting it has been delivered by its ‘world-class business continuity, hardware maintenance and data centre facilities in Queensland.’

Earlier this year, iTWire attended a special Interactive event talking cloud tactics and strategy, with a range of top speakers. The one hour event was captured on video with the article and video able to be read and watched at iTWire here.