Saturday Briefing

By Bill Peters

With the transfer of all employee functions to a work-from-home environment and the closure of the old Worldwide Contact Call Center on Galena Street in Denver (see “Going Truly Green article), it became necessary to move Outrigger Marketing Inc.’s (OMI) computer servers to a new location.

It took a team effort to completely vacate the space at the old call center and move our servers and electronic connections to a new data center. The move began in the late hours of Tuesday, September 29, and was completed by the evening of Thursday, October 1. OMI leased one technical cabinet at a secure data center, also in Denver, which now houses the remaining servers that OMI employees and all Hawaii-based Revenue Managers need to access.

Bob Owens, Director of Systems Operations, and John Neeley, Director of Systems and Programming, flew from Honolulu to Denver to help Jason Kemper, OMI’s IT Manager, and me, as we physically moved and reinstalled the servers. This had to be coordinated very closely with the IT staff – notably Bert Chock, Systems Analyst, and Joel Fernandez, Network Administrator – at the Outrigger Enterprises Data Center in Honolulu.

Moving the computer hardware and reinstalling all the servers was the easy part — that took all of two hours. The hard part was coordinating the installation of the Sprint MPLS virtual private network (VPN) connection through Qwest Communications.

As the evening wore into the wee hours of the morning, Bert and Joel were constantly on the phone with Jason and Bob, as well as a team of Cisco analysts in India trying to connect the Cisco servers so they could “talk” to one another. As they were trying to connect back to Honolulu, John and Jason started to work with Pegasus in Texas to reconnect all the Global Distribution Systems (GDS), such as Sabre, Worldspan, Galileo, and Amadeus. This was done through a separate virtual private network via AT&T; it went well on the first try.

Even though our systems were temporarily disconnected from Honolulu, Stellex 2 started to confirm reservations back to all the GDSs. This was possible because the information in Stellex 2 had been brought up-to-date when it was disconnected from what I call the “mother ship,” Stellex 1. Once Stellex 2 was reconnected, all reservations were transferred to the appropriate hotels without a hitch.

All consumer calls continued to be answered and processed during this down time. This was all made possible by our software provider Echopass continuing to pass all customer interactions to each OMI employee electronically at their work-at-home offices. The employees were able to answer calls and book reservations directly into Stellex 1 using an Internet connection. This also made it possible for the center’s wholesale agents working from home to continue processing all incoming rooming lists.

By the evening of October 1, all critical connections were back up and operating perfectly. Having the right backup procedures in place kept us “up” and taking reservations throughout the entire process.

I would like to send a BIG MAHALO to Bob, John, Jason, Bert, and Joel, who made it all possible by working many hours into the early morning for two days straight. Without their expertise and talents, this move would not have gone as smoothly as it did.