Royal Caribbean accelerates transformation with observability solutions

Overcoming the challenges of IT complexity

For Royal Caribbean, a seamless guest experience doesn’t begin when guests board their luxury cruise ships; it starts when they interact with their applications such as their online cruise-booking system.

However, business disruptions, online issues and a lack of transparency into the overall customer experience created a perfect storm of challenges. Without a comprehensive view of data across core customer services, applications and processes, true innovation remained elusive.

As a group, Royal Caribbean is proud of their entrepreneurial spirit, which drives them to innovate and not settle for “good enough”. They wanted to move beyond simple monitoring and use advanced observability capabilities to address problems before they affected guests. This would streamline their systems and enable their inhouse IT team to focus on innovations that would improve the customer experience and boost sustainability. They needed an end-to-end view of performance across systems, applications, multiple clouds and networks to deliver a superior customer experience.

With more than 250 applications, and the need to account for infrastructure and network performance, they invested in performance monitoring systems.

To ensure they got the greatest value from their investment they needed to be able to take advantage of these insights in real-time. They needed a technology transformation partner who could help them proactively address connectivity and network issues before they detracted from the seamless guest experience that Royal Caribbean strives for.

To deliver this they chose NTT DATA and our suite of observability services.

Multicloud monitoring, maturity assessments and more

Royal Caribbean turned to NTT DATA’s expertise in IT modernization to assist them in discovering and detecting anomalies across applications and infrastructure, and implementing automation processes to better understand problems in real time.

Using our 360 Observability solution and multicloud services, along with Cisco’s AppDynamics application monitoring tools, Royal Caribbean has been able to go from making after-the-fact fixes to implementing full-stack observability. Rather than trying to monitor and fix separate systems, they’re able to use a solution that provided them with automated, real-time insights, alongside multicloud application monitoring and full visibility across their IT system to tackle problems before they occur.

The voyage to managed observability started with a maturity assessment on Royal Caribbean’s environment. We helped them identify gaps and recommended solutions to bridge them. However, the large number of existing cloud applications in the Royal Caribbean network made for a complex environment. Using tiers of gold, silver or bronze to categorize applications, we were able to make sure that essential services were prioritized and monitored by AppDynamics. We also made sure that future software applications are developed to ensure observability from day one.

These insights provide valuable information about the behavior, performance, and health of applications and infrastructure. The company’s IT teams can now proactively identify and resolve issues and deliver the best customer experiences, even during the website’s busiest times.

Managing complexity with observability

NTT DATA’s observability solutions have provided the fuel to help accelerate Royal Caribbean’s digital transformation journey, delivering the capability to optimize everything from online booking and check-in to onboard activities and checkout.

Faster resolution, lower costs

The partnership between Royal Caribbean, NTT DATA and Cisco has allowed the business to speed up resolution times by up to 50%. With AppDynamics, they’ve shifted from monitoring and troubleshooting to observability and proactively addressing issues before they impact guests.

Enhanced customer experiences

Gaining an in-depth understanding of their application environment enables the business to focus on important information and take advantage of rich data analysis that delivers actionable insights.

Improved productivity and innovation

Managed observability services free up IT resources, making it possible to automate solutions and deliver exceptional experiences to prospects and guests.

Consolidated information and clearer insights Observability improves the quality of decision-making by providing a unified, comprehensive view of system information, along with better data integration and analysis.

Leveraging our depth of expertise

Royal Caribbean leverage our cloud services expertise and the insights gained from AppDynamics to streamline their environment and deliver a high level of operational efficiency.