Enjoy is a leading entertainment company that manages casinos and hotels in the regions of Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay. In 2018, the company's IT department began searching for a leading technology solution to solve their problems with slow response times. By working with a regional consultancy firm, Enjoy found the solution it needed in Nutanix's hyperconverged infrastructure. Following the implementation of the Nutanix infrastructure and the support of a special project, Enjoy benefited from measurable time and cost savings, excellent response times, and an improved guest experience.
| Measurable time and cost savings | Excellent response time | Improved experience for the end customer | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Substantial savings in both costs and time due to the improvement of operational efficiency and the advancement of automated processes. | Response times improved by nearly 100% through a massive reduction of machine deployment time from weeks to less than a day. | Continuous availability and the ability to respond to issues in less time greatly improved the guest experience at all hotels and casinos. |
I would sum up our experience with Nutanix in three words: flexibility, efficiency, and speed. With hyperconverged infrastructure, we have generated tremendous cost and time savings. The current team is capable of delivering infrastructure that we did not have prepared for Nutanix and we have been able to provide it very quickly with great efficiency.
With a presence throughout Chile and parts of Argentina and Uruguay, Enjoy is an entertainment company that owns and operates casinos and hotels with more than 7,000 slot machines, a significant number of gaming tables, and a 100% built-in loyalty club.
Enjoy employs 7,000 people company-wide in its three countries of operation. Its IT department includes approximately 30 people at the headquarters in Chile and another five or six IT people at each of the satellite offices.
Fabián Rojas, Solutions Architect at Enjoy, works in developing infrastructure, telematics, and software projects, as well as in the leadership of the cyber security area.
Manuel Yévenes Flores, CIO and CTO of Enjoy, oversees the support, operations, architecture, cyber security, and project development team for the entire company in Argentina, Chile, and Uruguay. His primary function is to define Enjoy's information and communication technology strategy, the general technological roadmap, and cyber security protocols.
As an entertainment company providing high-quality services to its guests, Enjoy struggled to overcome response time issues a few years ago. “When we deployed a machine, we needed a whole infrastructure team to complete the project and it would take up to two weeks depending on the volume," Rojas explains. "In 2018, we were about to open a new hotel system called Opera and we knew we would need to deploy a high volume of machines. I started looking for a solution that would allow us easy and fast deployment.”
In addition to addressing delayed response times, Enjoy was also looking for a solution that would set them apart from their competitors. “Competition in all of our business areas is very fierce, and we wanted a tool that would allow us to react quickly and scale easily,” shares Rojas.
Rojas and his team began the search for a technological solution that would allow Enjoy to overcome its challenges and achieve its innovation goals. However, there was a lot at stake for Enjoy's brand image when looking for the right technological solution.
“If we don't have the systems available, we are subject to fines and sanctions imposed by legal entities such as the Chilean Superintendent of Casinos,” explains Rojas. “They are very strict regarding the gambling systems, so if you don't have the systems available, they could order you to close your casino.”
With all that they had at stake, Enjoy began the evaluation of the traditional hyperconverged infrastructure solution to solve their problems. They partnered with the Emtec Group, a regional technology consulting firm, which introduced them to Nutanix.
“As the project leader, my team and I became interested in Nutanix for several reasons. First, we had unanimous support from Emtec Group for the Nutanix solution, then Gartner talked about Nutanix as a leader in hyperconverged tools, and finally, we looked at Nutanix success stories that had data and references to back them up,” shares Rojas.
After several negotiations, Enjoy officially partnered with Nutanix to implement their hyperconverged infrastructure in 2018.
Currently, Enjoy has approximately 95% of its core systems on Nutanix, including the gambling area, ERP, hotel, and food and beverage. The main Nutanix tools used are Nutanix Kubernetes Engine (formerly Karbon) as a container tool and Nutanix Cloud Manager (formerly Prism). They also run various applications and workloads on Nutanix such as ERP, SAP, food applications, hotel applications such as “Opera” with Oracle database, print servers, file servers, controllers domain and slot machine management applications.
The most significant benefit Enjoy has seen since the Nutanix implementation is improved response times. Deploying a large number of new machines at once used to take two weeks, but on the Opera project, they were able to deploy 20 machines in one morning.
“We had 20 machines deployed with their updates and operating systems at 100% capacity in less than a day. Our experience with Nutanix was quite positive in perfectly fulfilling that deployment,” Rojas details. “With Nutanix, we manage our entire platform within the same application, including administration, important events, reporting, etc., so our response times have improved by almost 100%.”
In addition to the time savings, Enjoy has also experienced cost savings since the Nutanix rollout. “Since implementing Nutanix four years ago, we haven't had to do the capacity planning refresh process, which costs $250,000 a year. That means we've saved about $1 million over four years from savings from the capacity planning process,” says Flores. “In terms of support and maintenance, after the implementation of Nutanix, we were able to modify a contract with another technology partner in half, so we're talking about an additional three-year savings of $300,000 since we implemented Nutanix.”
Nutanix has also provided Enjoy with ease of scalability to stand out from the competition. “Nutanix allows us to have an immediate contingency plan and the flexibility to have a new machine available and in production in a few minutes. This important milestone makes a big difference compared to our competition,” says Rojas.
Enjoy has also eliminated manual steps in IT management with Nutanix's automated processes. “The administration and ease of management of the virtual machines is practically automated. Thanks to the reports that Nutanix provides us, we have an updated and automatic inventory of all the machines that are on or off in real-time. This work was previously done manually to know if the machine was on or off. Today, Nutanix makes it automatic,” explains Rojas.
These automated processes through Nutanix also reduce human error in Enjoy's operations. “Writing in a spreadsheet or connecting to a machine is prone to some mistakes. People can accidentally map to the wrong IP or mistype the name of a machine, exhausting all sorts of risks and bad practices. Today, we know that when we connect to a machine in Nutanix, we are 100% sure it is the active machine,” says Rojas.
The Nutanix implementation has also directly improved the experience for customers. “By having permanent availability and the ability to respond to problems in less time, our guests' experience has greatly improved and has reinforced our brand image. Our goal is that the client has a good experience in our casinos or hotels, so improving their experience has been very important to us,” explains Rojas.
Rojas and his team greatly appreciate the excellent customer support that Nutanix offers. “The support capabilities of Nutanix are quite positive. When something goes wrong or there is a major event, the case is automatically opened and the issue is often resolved before we even know it's a problem,” shares Rojas. “However, the truth is that Nutanix is a very stable platform. We haven't had any significant events where we needed dedicated support.”
Although there are few occasions when customer support has been needed, Rojas does appreciate that the Nutanix system offers support in both English and Spanish, depending on each person's preferences, so there is no language barrier.
Rojas was also pleasantly surprised by the ease of administration of the Nutanix platform. “The management of the Nutanix platform for our Operations Team is very easy to use. With the reports and alerts, they are 100% informed of the most relevant KPIs of the platform, memory, space, CPU, active machines, inactive machines, etc.”, details Rojas.
It's been mentioned several times, but it's important to note that there were two unique success stories within this case study. Firstly, the implementation of the Nutanix infrastructure for Enjoy as a whole, and secondly, the deployment of Opera on Nutanix at its opening. “Nutanix was super flexible because we asked them to help us with the Opera project a month before the planned hyperconverged infrastructure deployment, and they happily and successfully compiled the special project along with the deployment,” Flores explains.
“The Opera project was a team effort between the Emtec Group and Nutanix,” said Flores. “The Emtec Group had the technical capacity with their engineering team to implement the project, and Nutanix had the tools and flexibility we needed. The project ended up being the first implementation of the Oracle BMS solution on Nutanix in Latin America.”
The partnership between Enjoy, Nutanix and the Emtec Group improved Enjoy's operational efficiency and technological superiority.
“I would summarize our experience with Nutanix in three words: flexibility, efficiency, and speed. I think those three words define what we have with Nutanix. With hyperconverged infrastructure, we have generated substantial cost and time savings. Today, the team can provision infrastructure that we haven't had for Nutanix and we've been able to provision it very quickly with great efficiency,” says Flores.
Building on the successful implementation of hyperconverged infrastructure, Enjoy is looking at other Nutanix solutions that can further streamline its operational efficiency. Rojas and his team are especially interested in a micro-segmentation solution that can help with cyber security defenses.
"With the current cyber threats, we believe it is important to start adding other components to bolster our existing cyber security platform. We were evaluating micro-segmentation and database management for both SQL and Oracle. We believe an additional component will provide us with better protection, and we plan to work again with the Emtec Group to determine the best solution for success," shares Rojas.