Lonely Planet began moving Web services to the cloud three years ago because it wanted to focus on building digital products.
Speaking at Connect 15 in Melbourne, Lonely Planet head of cloud services, Darragh Kennedy, said that it started out using the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud infrastructure in the United States before the Sydney service was launched in November 2012.
Kennedy said that cloud is an important tool to help the company compete globally and focus on building products rather than using a data centre.
“When the iPhone came along in 2007, Lonely Planet had to adapt how we worked and created products. People want travel information on their phone. By the time the iPad came along in 2010, Apple came to us prior to the launch and we put together an app,” he said.
While the company still publishes books, it has a range of apps for tablets and e-readers such as Kindle.
Lonely Planet added more systems engineers and developers to its team to build a cloud environment quickly.
“We treated it [cloud] as a software project and used infrastructure as code. It was all through automation,” said Kennedy.
In 2013, the company announced that it would replace an SAP R/3 4.7 implementation with NetSuite OneWorld as part of its shift to the cloud.
Lonely Planet is using the ERP suite to manage its financials, CRM, demand planning, project management, warehousing and manufacturing activities.
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Hamish Barwick travelled to Connect 15 as a guest of Alcatel-Lucent
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