Customers

Experiencias Xcaret Chooses Nutanix Enterprise Cloud

COMPANY

Experiencias Xcaret is a privately owned and operated group of theme parks, resorts, and ecotourism development located in the Riviera Maya, a portion of the Caribbean coastline of Mexico’s state of Quintana Roo. INDUSTRY Leisure, Entertainment, Hospitality

BUSINESS NEEDS

Management of disparate IT infrastructure at each company location was complex and time-consuming. Wanted to find an integrated solution for all sites that would ease management overhead while enhancing the customer experience.

SOLUTION

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform

  • Acropolis Software, including built-in hypervisor, AHV
  • Prism management plane Applications
  • Oracle OPERA Hotel Property Management System (PMS) \
  • Siriusware for parks operations (reservations, multi point-of-sales and access control)
  • Microsoft Dynamics AX for enterprise resource planning (ERP)
  • SAP S4/HANA
  • TIBCO ESB

BENEFITS

  • Standardized IT infrastructure across all resort properties, reducing management complexity and costs
  • Achieved better business agility and time to value with fast deployment
  • Reduced ERP application process times from hours to minutes, improving customer experience for millions of park visitors

CHALLENGE

Since its opening in December 1990, Xcaret Park has quickly become one of the most famous attractions in Mexico. With 7 park properties located in the Cancun and Mayan Riviera region, Xcaret provides a wide range of eco-archaeological locations where visitors can experience the natural and cultural richness of Mexico.

“Experiencias Xcaret is a destination attraction that welcomes more than 3.2 million guests each year, which translates into more than a third of the area’s annual visitors,” explained Dagoberto Hernandez, Director of Technology for Xcaret. “We also have the biggest private transportation company in the country. Our IT team is responsible for managing all of the infrastructure, applications, and services that enable our company to deliver an excellent travel experience to all of our park visitors.”

Xcaret’s popularity as a tourist destination has been increasing rapidly. In addition to expanding the number of attractions and services offered at its existing properties, Experiencias Xcaret has also opened several new parks over the last few years. “Every single one of our parks was using different server and storage technologies, making infrastructure management a huge challenge for our IT team,” Hernandez said. “We needed to find a way to simplify our IT operations, so we started looking for an integrated environment that could be used across all of our business properties.”

SOLUTION

Experiencias Xcaret made the decision to move from its heterogeneous legacy infrastructure and standardize on Nutanix Enterprise Cloud in 2017. “One of the biggest benefits of Nutanix is that it truly is an integrated system that simplifies management across all of our locations, but it also offers unmatched flexibility and easy scalability,” noted Hernandez. “By moving to the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform, our IT team is able to provide infrastructure and manage all of our business applications with one single click.”

Hernandez and his team migrated all of Xcaret’s key applications and services over to the Nutanix platform, including its mission-critical Oracle OPERA Hotel Property Management System (PMS), Siriusware for parks operations, Microsoft Dynamics AX for enterprise resource planning (ERP), SAP S4/HANA and its TIBCO enterprise service bus, among other mission critical business applications.

Xcaret also made the decision to use AHV, Nutanix’s built-in virtualization solution. “At the beginning, we were not sure what hypervisor to use,” admitted Hernandez. “But in order to maximize the potential of the Nutanix platform, we decided to use AHV. Since Nutanix AHV was built from the ground up to provide a much simpler and more scalable hypervisor and associated management platform, it’s easily manageable by anyone on our team, from DevOps teams to our DBAs.”

RESULTS

Fast Deployment and Easy Management

The Nutanix Enterprise Cloud deployment went very quickly, according to Hernandez. “When we deployed Nutanix, it was amazing to see how quickly we were able to be up and running and build new environments for our business. Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software has enabled us to greatly simplify operations for our IT team.”

Faster Processes

Nutanix has also improved the performance of Xcaret’s business processes and services. “Our parks and hotel application systems must be able to process thousands of transactions per minute,” Hernandez said. “That’s why we decided to use Nutanix’s all-flash technology. After moving everything to Nutanix, our business-critical ERP processes that used to take hours to run now finish in just a few minutes.”

Enjoying Proactive Support

“We love how easy it is to use Nutanix Support,” added Hernandez. “It was the first time that we have received proactive support on an integrated platform. We couldn’t be happier than with Nutanix as our ongoing support partner.”

Providing a Better Customer Experience

“As a tourist destination, our most important goal is continually improving the visitor experience,” explained Hernandez. “We wanted to reduce the time our customers spend in lines for attractions, and shorten the time it takes them to complete transactions online, including making reservations and obtaining customer service. The biggest value of the Nutanix platform for us is not coming from the excellent ROI numbers we’ve obtained, it’s the huge improvements in customer satisfaction. The feedback we’re getting from our annual visitors is confirming that we made an excellent decision in moving to Nutanix Enterprise Cloud.”

NEXT STEPS

“We are now in the process of moving a lot of our applications from onprem deployments, to digital and to the cloud, so we needed a technology that could work equally well across all of these environments,” explained Hernandez. “The Nutanix software, including AHV, is enabling us to not only support our on-prem deployments, it also works seamlessly with our applications in the public cloud. Going forward, all of our infrastructure will be based on the Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform.”

Nutanix Enterprise Cloud software and AHV are enabling us to not only support our on-prem deployments, it works seamlessly with our applications in the public cloud. Going forward, all of our infrastructure will be based on the Nutanix platform.

Dagoberto Hernandez, Director of Technology, Experiencias Xcaret