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Meliá Beyond Cloud
Meliá is a hotel company with more than 60 years of history. It owns 384 hotels counting 97,000 rooms, and 8 brands in more than 40 countries. 70% of Meliá's reservations come from its own online channels.
In 2015, Meliá committed to evolving its digital channels by launching a new web and mobile app. This despite continuing to have a monolithic application based on Java and a proprietary CMS (content management system). To evolve further, Meliá needed a fast and flexible CMS that would give them the shortest possible time to value.
From this need, Meliá Beyond Cloud was born, a project based on the adoption of an Open Source approach to achieve faster time to market and an improvement in scalability, performance and flexibility, to support a vertical growth of the company.
Meliá Beyond Cloud relies on four pillars:
- Open Source as the main element of transformation to enhance innovation, flexibility, transparency and community.
- Team transformation: to achieve agility and software quality.
- Micro services: development agility, implementation flexibility and precise scalability.
- Migration to the Cloud: scalability, elasticity and efficiency.
Highlights
The Challenge
Replacing an old monolithic platform
Despite the great commitment to its digital channels, and the improvements in usability, personalization, customer data management and process automation, the backend of the application was still holding back Meliá's digital transformation.
So, in order to achieve the pillars of its transformation, the hotel company was looking for an open source CMS to replace its customized monolithic solution.
The new CMS had to meet the following criteria:
- Ease of use and simplicity (to enable all regions to use the tool)
- Flexibility and extensibility
- Open source
- Development speed (short time to market)
- Cloud friendliness
- Vendor support
- Relevant references and powerful network of partners
- Built on J2EE technology
Magnolia successfully fulfilled the list of requirements and the objective was to place it at the center of all of Meliá's digital channels in order to attract customers via its owned channels. Magnolia would enable editors to design templates, publish landing pages for events, all while providing efficient time to market and access to external data sources.
The Solution
A flexible and user-friendly CMS
The selection of Magnolia as a new CMS for Melia.com had a greater impact than powering the web and mobile channels, as it also became the foundations of Meliá Content Hub where all the company's content is stored.
For Meliá, Magnolia is quick, safe, easy to use, and provides editor autonomy for creating landing pages. This streamlines the publishing processes and reduces the time to market. Additionally, Magnolia allowed easy integration with external systems based on REST API.
Integrations
- Salesforce Marketing Cloud for digital marketing
- DAM for unification of multimedia assets
- Meliá Content Hub unified all content from all Meliá hotels (Intrastay, btandHub, etc.)
- Flows built on Jira to migrate to advanced flow implementations
- eCommerce integration via REST API
Migration to the Cloud
A high-availability infrastructure could be set up in Amazon Web Services in a quick fashion, being accessible to external sources and based on scalability of public nodes.
The Result
The project went live in March 2018. In the first months, Meliá achieved the following outcomes:
- The team was trained in just one month: more than 350 hotels and 500 users.
- It was possible to carry out roles and permissions for hotels and corporations in different geographical areas.
- An excellent time to market.
- Decoupling of the back-end from front-end.
- Needs that emerged throughout the process could be successfully covered by Magnolia.
0+
Landing pages a week
0
templates, based on 40 components
In just over a month we trained more than 350 hotels and 500 users. In a week, they had already created 40 landing pages.
It is a very intuitive tool, well designed and intended for the contributor. We also think that it is a flexible tool that adapts much better than other CMS we have had.
Magnolia's great contribution is that it has allowed us to create a template and module system. It gives us agility, freedom, the power to eliminate many questions to the systems team. The contribution team now creates their landings in a very short time… Now they are making landings in a jiffy.
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