TTG – Tourismus Technologie GmbH

As one of the world’s most visited countries, tourism in Austria has evolved into a large, sophisticated business. Generating an estimated economic benefit of nearly €18 billion in 2012 alone, tourism contributes greatly to the overall employment and the quality of life that Austrians enjoy and proudly share with their visitors.

While the role of The national Upper Austrian tourist board is to develop brand and promotional strategies along with marketing materials and with the strong focus on the visitor, TTG is tasked with providing the IT services, infrastructure and expertise needed to power online strategies and associated services utilized by the tourism industry in that region. This includes websites, the relational database TOURDATA, , email, , data storage systems, software, servers and collaboration platforms all backed by Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

“Over the years TTG has implemented a very stable infrastructure that is highly rated by our customers,” stated Peter Szelegowitz, TTG’s head of data processing center. “We are proud of our reputation and regularly exceed our SLAs thanks to our goal of no downtime.”

TTG was migrating PC users to a normal OS install, and due to the decentralized approach wanted to store user data and commonly shared files on servers at local destinations for fast access.

These files were associated with a variety of applications and formats including Microsoft Office, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe PDF and multimedia files for video, animations and photo art.

Additionally, TTG wanted to support file sharing and collaboration amongst designers, writers and editors that develop and maintain marketing materials to ensure that the current versions of marketing collateral and media were automatically maintained at each office location. At first TTG tried to utilize Microsoft DFSR supplemented with an internally developed file locking utility, but continuously ran into performance problems caused by power users attempting to replicate large volumes of data and unstable Internet connections at remote locations triggering system crashes that led to lost data and unhappy users. 

Next TTG implemented a cloud-based solution that did not have the performance of a system that distributed and synced files at each location. According to Szelegowitz, “We quickly discovered problems trying to share and copy large multimedia files from a central location, especially with tourism destinations that were far into the country and still do not have fast Internet connections. These locations were at a disadvantage when they needed to interact eg. with their local press agencies and partners and could not quickly access to the latest promotional and business materials.” 

After a quick initial installation and some consultations with Peer’s office in Munich, TTG was up and running.

“All of our destinations, including those in remote locations now enjoy faster performance and do not experience the data loss and file corruption that they used to encounter,” added Szelegowitz.