Iconic Okada Manila exceeds customer expectations with Cisco ACI and Citrix NetScaler

Three years ago, Tiger Resorts announced plans to build the largest casino in Manila, Philippines. Carved in 44 hectares of picturesque oceanfront, Okada Manila features luxury suites, state-of-the-art gaming and entertainment facilities, as well as dining, retail, and outdoor amenities and is set to become Manila’s iconic integrated resort.

The IT landscape:

Paramount to Okada’s success, is a strong foundation of a world-class IT Infrastructure. The resort runs more than a hundred different applications to support the environment and deliver an integrated experience for its customers. Applications include hotel booking and phone systems, casino gaming applications, retail applications, and day-to-day administrative applications such as ERP, financial applications, and procurement systems. The infrastructure team must build and support data centers, servers, network, and application deployment systems. Security plays a critical role in the resort’s IT environment to protect data, enable access, and prevent data loss. After evaluating several vendors, Tiger Resorts turned to Citrix and Cisco to provide world-class solutions and deliver industry-leading networking and virtualization services, so that they can meet and exceed customer expectations.

For details of Scott Dries’s Video interview, Click Here.

The Deployment Environment: Tiger Resorts is currently in the early phases of implementation. Citrix NetScaler is utilized for load balancing and will provide application security and acceleration services in the future. Cisco ACI forms the backbone of the infrastructure for the campus and data center networks. In addition, Citrix XenDesktop provides the platform for desktop virtualization. ShareFile provides an enterprise file sharing platform and Citrix XenMobile will be used to provide mobile applications to any device while delivering a great user experience.

Unique value Tiger Resorts delivers to its customers: On a daily basis, Tiger Resorts deals with different customer basis. They need to think creative, basically try to outsmart their competitors and try to deliver exceptional experience to their guests and keep constantly evolving. In this kind of industry, there are always new things happening, new challenges coming up. People want newer and different experiences. They’re all looking for that world class service that can actually provide that kind of experience. And, Okada brings that to the Philippines.

How does Cisco and Citrix deliver that differentiated value? In Dries Scott’s own words, summarized below:

“The combination of NetScaler and ACI make it less painstaking to configure various components to deploy application services to the business. Cisco ACI provides us the capability to have more agility on a network and to deploy the necessary services for the applications, the necessary load balancing, the necessary network configurations in a very easy, and almost one click process. Both on the Citrix side, as well as on the Cisco side, the integrated solution saves a tremendous amount of labor and time needed to get the resort up and running.”

Dries Scott, senior vice president of information technology, Okada Manila

From an operational benefits angle, Cisco’s advanced networking technology enabled both the Data Center and Campus networks deployed in a fast and efficient manner. The combination of NetScaler and Cisco made operations so simple while configuring various different components to deploy application services to the business. Being an integrated solution, Tiger Resorts could almost do it just from one central location through the Cisco unified ACI management dashboard. Given the short runway Tiger Resorts had for Infrastructure setup, Cisco-Citrix joint solution proved an ideal foil, saving a tremendous amount of labor and time in getting the resort up and running. Also, Cisco-Citrix solution improved scalability and management of the applications and systems, through just in time allocation of resources only to the applications that needs them.

Conclusion:

Citrix and Cisco solutions will help Tiger Resorts meet the ever-changing needs of their business in a fast, responsive matter and help Okada Manila deliver a world-class experience.From a roadmap perspective, Okada is planning to automate most of their processes, and as well implement security hardening on both network and application side. And Dries Scott is confident, that Cisco and Citrix combination would assist most definitely in getting these accomplished quickly and correctly.

To catch more on Okada success story, register for an upcoming ACI – Citrix NetScaler webinar scheduled for April 5. Register here:

Related links:

www.cisco.com/go/acicitrix

www.cisco.com/go/aci

Dries Scott’s Video Testimonial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu1gYg_bED8