Odeon

Customer overview

Founded in 1930, ODEON is the largest and arguably best-known cinema chain in the UK and Ireland, and has over the last 90 years, become synonymous with the big screen. Committed to giving moviegoers a cinematic experience rather than just a comfy place to watch a film, ODEON has a history of being quick to adopt the very latest technology, from Dolby to iSense. Now owned by AMC Theatres, the biggest movie exhibition company in the world, ODEON also operates the UK’s largest cinema screen, the BFI IMAX in London.

ODEON’s commitment to harnessing the latest digital technology means the company was an early adopter of cloud. However, when the contract came to an end ODEON went to market to find a flexible and scalable solution that provided greater autonomy and control.

M247 worked with ODEON to build a bespoke, hybrid-cloud solution that gives them the full capabilities of public cloud in a private cloud setting, including the ability to scale and flex at will, and much greater control as standard.

Customer challenge

ODEON’s primary challenge was how to harness full public cloud capabilities in a private cloud environment, and gain the ability to create and spin up their own VMs as and when they needed, without having to rely on the service provider to do it for them. The customer wanted greater control over their own data and infrastructure, through a solution that integrated seamlessly with the existing MPLS network across two locations, as well as the primary data estate in Azure. The solution also needed to shore up ODEON’s disaster recovery strategy, and the customer required project turnaround within a tight timeframe, of just a few months.

Customer goal

ODEON needed greater flexibility from a private cloud provider, through a solution that integrated with the existing third-party MPLS network and Azure data estate. They wanted full access to and control over the entire business environment, with the autonomy to be able to build, provision and manage their own VMs without penalty. They also wanted an improved disaster recovery strategy and capabilities.

Our solution

M247 developed a bespoke solution incorporating our powerful, enterprise-grade 247Cloud™ platform to support a hybrid cloud strategy for data storage, access, unification and management. We delivered the solutions across two locations, giving the customer a unified view of the environment and greater flexibility and scalability across the network.

Working to meet the customer’s requirement to build and manage their own VMs, our team tailored a hybrid cloud solution that gives ODEON access to their own VM management tool and supports a level of commercial flexibility no other providers could.

By integrating our solution seamlessly with ODEON’s existing network, we were able to ensure they have greater control over their own solution, with web portal access that allows for the self-deployment of new workloads.

Alongside the enhanced security and resilience of the IaaS element, we incorporated BUaaS and DRaaS significantly improving upon their existing disaster-recovery strategy. All designed to ensure the business would be able to fully restore data and applications within minutes, ensuring any downtime was limited and business could be restored and fully operational quickly, avoiding lost revenue and reducing the impact on customer experience of any outage.

Results and benefits

With the M247 solution, ODEON now has complete oversight and control over the entire business infrastructure and can build, provision and deploy new VMs for true commercial flexibility.

The hybrid cloud solution provides ODEON with enhanced data protection and recovery capabilities across sites, with DRaaS enabling full recovery and restoration within minutes.