Since moving the finance platform to AWS, Holiday Extras has seen quantifiable improvements in speed, reliability, ease of scalability, and user satisfaction. These all contribute to a finance system that reflects the company’s cash flow more accurately.

Anthony Clarke-Cowell, head of communication at Holiday Extras, says, “We pay around half the price for our hosting compared to before, which does impact bottom the line, and there are longer term benefits. We have had excellent feedback from partners and suppliers who find that their interactions with our finance process are easier, quicker, and more efficient.”

One variable of the system is ReconArt, a transaction-matching service that takes an import file from the company’s booking system and processes it into a file that OpenAccounts can understand. It only runs for a couple of hours a day, but its work is crucial to the business.

Turner says, “Since going live with OpenAccounts, we often had performance issues due to the massive volume of transactions it's referencing. Using AWS, we have had no such issues since we've been on the platform.” The speed of the platform has also vastly increased. The nightly booking integration process that used to take 15 minutes now takes just five, and reports encompassing hundreds of thousands of lines now compile within an hour, when before they could take up to three.

Clarke-Cowell

adds, “Internal teams now have considerably better insight into budgetary spend and can process invoices quicker and with less bureaucratic overhead. Our finance team reports that they can get their work done in half the time. All these things impact our ability to grow and to continue to provide the highest level of service to our partners and suppliers.”

According to Turner, other benefits include regaining control of the environment and the peace of mind that comes with the reliability of AWS.

“Now we can monitor our platform ourselves and make changes straight away,” Turner says. “We can change the memory or CPU of the environment so easily. Previously we’d have to request this from the hosters , which would go through a committee, taking weeks.

” Turner adds that the environment is self-healing, self-monitoring, and self-scaling, and his team rarely needs to log on and make changes. This is partly due to the use of AWS CloudFormation, which provides Holiday Extras with a reproducible infrastructure.

Smith says, “We’ve gone through a lot of stopping and starting of the infrastructure to test its resilience. We’ve stopped it and brought it back up in another Availability Zone, so we had the confidence that it could be reproduced, and we even copied the whole stack to the AWS Frankfurt region.”

Turner and Smith are confident that they have found the right solution in AWS. “It’s such an easy relationship,” says Turner. “That’s very hard to find these days. If someone offered us the chance to move to a competitor of AWS for half the price, we wouldn’t do it.”

Holiday Extras also works with AWS on beta trials for new services “because AWS knows we’re trying to push things forward,” Turner says. Future plans include a migration of the company’s data warehouse from IBM DB2 to Amazon Redshift, and gradually moving to a microservices model. Turner says, “We want to foster more of a DevOps culture and push the idea of infrastructure as code. Using AWS, we feel confident we can achieve that.”