Club Premier Achieves 30% Infrastructure Cost Savings, 25% More Development Efficiency on AWS

By positioning itself as the leading coalition loyalty program in Mexico, Club Premier allows its 6.7 million members to exchange accumulated rewards points for countless benefits, ranging from flights to wine tastings, incomparable dinners, online store items, accommodations, cruises, and more. In 2018, the company decided to take over the management of its booking engine so that new services, features, and offers were quickly created and delivered to members, ensuring memorable experiences for those customers. As part of this strategy, Club Premier chose the technology of Amazon Web Services (AWS) as the standard for creating a cloud architecture, data analytics services, and agile development models.

The 6.7 million members enrolled in the Club Premier program* can accumulate Premier Points in more than 100 affiliated companies, as well as airlines, and through purchases with co-branded bank cards. More than 20,000 Prize Tickets are redeemed every month. All of this, in addition to the changing demands of the market and customers, made it necessary for Club Premier to have the ability to quickly and constantly introduce changes to the tool.

Historically, Club Premier outsourced the booking engine to a third party, but as the demand from its members increased significantly, the engine was overstrained, making it impossible to provide the level of detail and service that customers deserved.

The adoption of agile development models as an operating standard to help offer new and better functions to its Members required the ability to introduce constant changes in the system. "This was not compatible with the previous platform as it followed a 'waterfall' methodology, allowing one or two cycles of changes per year," explains Carlos Maya Desdier, infrastructure area manager at Club Premier.

Finally, due to the nature of the business, the various teams, including data analysis, CRM, and commercial, required real-time access to data on the behavior of travelers in order to analyze and facilitate decision making. "Even though they had the ability to carry out analysis, they were very slow. It was necessary to go through more complex processes, and analysis and action-taking took too long," says Rodrigo Barrón Cornejo, technology initiatives infrastructure expert of Club Premier.

All of this led Club Premier to decide to bring its technological infrastructure process management and the development processes for the platform internal to Club Premier.

* Data as of June 30, 2020

Maya Desdier explains that Club Premier sought a provider that had a very good reputation in the technological field, in addition to the support of several renowned clients, certified partners that could support their services, and the ability to offer Club Premier some specific functionalities. "We needed to be able to grow or reduce the computing capacity according to user demand patterns automatically, using financial resources in the most efficient way," says Maya Desdier. 

The company also sought to enter an availability agreement that was top-ranked in the market, to have a security-as-a-service layer that was easy to implement, and to have a data center with the most important international certifications.

With the support and consulting services of Itera, an Advanced AWS Partner, Club Premier and its development branch IDS completed all the documentation and designed the new architecture. The implementation was carried out, according to Barrón, in a very simple and fast manner. The first half of 2018 was a transition period, and by mid-year, everything was on the new platform.

"In addition, there are many official educational resources to explain topics, clarify doubts, and learn about the services," says Barrón, adding that such quality helped Club Premier complete the process successfully and with no setbacks.

The new Club Premier technology infrastructure uses Amazon API Gateway to serve constant streams of requests from the Members, regardless of their volume, and Amazon CloudFront to achieve the most fluid and uniform journey as possible. "This solution enables Club Premier to deliver content safely, quickly, and with low latency to its Members," says Maya Desdier.

In addition, the infrastructure uses Amazon Inspector to always meet and be aligned with the quality standards available in the industry, and AWS Security Hub to give the security operations team a single centralized console where they can review and follow up on alerts and findings.

AWS Glue and Amazon Redshift are responsible for ensuring fast and easy access to data for efficient and correct decision-making based on objective metrics.

Choosing AWS solutions brought global business and technology benefits. "There is no downtime in customer support anymore. With AWS, we can provide all the services that the Member is looking for," says Maya Desdier. The company achieved an increase in its capacity to serve large numbers of Members from 60 requests per second to 250 requests per second. According to the executive official, the availability of the application today is higher than 99.95 percent.

On the other hand, Club Premier managed to keep the platform costs at very low levels and in line with the Members’ usage pattern by leveraging the horizontal scalability provided by AWS. "We achieved a reduction in operating and development costs vs. the outsourced platform that we used to have. We achieved savings in the 25 percent range," says Maya Desdier.

With the new technological infrastructure, Club Premier can respond more quickly not only to business demands but also to the needs of the Members, providing them with new functions and services to ensure memorable experiences. The company gained the ability to serve events or special sales with greater resources and without the need to commit to contracts with forced terms.

"On AWS, we have immediate access to data on the behavior of Members for decision making," says Barrón. AWS solutions also allow for the procurement and implementation of new infrastructures in very short periods to serve new projects or business initiatives.

Barrón points out that the time to implement new development cycles has also decreased—semi-annual development cycles are now monthly development cycles. Finally, the company was able to expand information security and recorded cost savings from a traditional data center model of more than 30 percent.

Club Premier plans to continue making investments that support its innovation plan. The company's future endeavors include the implementation of tools such as AWS Code Deploy to automate deployments and test cycles, reducing the possibility of human error. "We also plan the use of artificial intelligence to make provisioning decisions and automatically delete instances based on customer flow," says Barrón.