The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited Selects Verizon's Enterprise Cloud to Help Deliver Outstanding Customer Service

The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited (HSH), one of Asia's leading hospitality groups, has chosen a Verizon Terremark enterprise cloud computing solution to consolidate and centralize its technology infrastructure and better support its customers.

HSH was incorporated in 1866 and owns and operates a range of prestigious hotels and commercial and residential properties across Asia, the United States and Europe, including the luxury Peninsula Hotels in nine cities.

HSH, which focuses on excellent customer service, realized that centralizing its IT infrastructure would better align its processes and systems in support of its customers.  The company decided to adopt a hybrid public/private cloud computing infrastructure that enables it to leverage additional capacity on demand during peak booking periods.

Additionally, by eliminating the need to maintain servers at the company's many locations around the globe, HSH's central IT team would be able to focus its efforts on accelerating the development of new services for both guests and staff.

HSH chose Verizon due to its proven ability to deliver a highly scalable, secure and efficient environment from which critical data and applications such as Microsoft Office 365 and SharePoint could be integrated and accessed with HSH's global active directory structure.

Verizon's professional services team collaborated closely with HSH throughout an intensive migration planning and delivery process to safeguard against business disruptions by ensuring that critical systems such as reservations and back-office applications would be available and fully operational throughout the transition. This comprehensive planning and review process was critical to the project's success.

Shane Izaks, HSH's general manager of information technology, said: "We provide our discerning guests with world-class hospitality and unparalleled guest services throughout the customer experience. A robust, secure and reliable IT infrastructure is critical to delivering this, whether in terms of supporting our Web presence, our reservations system, our in-house service delivery or our ongoing customer interactions.

"Scalability to support our expanding business requirements was a key concern for us, but so too was a solution that would support agility and help us be more innovative in our service and solution delivery. Verizon's enterprise cloud services are widely recognized as best-in-class, and in the Verizon team we have also found the expertise and experience to make our vision a reality."

Verizon Enterprise Solutions creates global connections that generate growth, drive business innovation and move society forward. With industry-specific solutions and a full range of global wholesale offerings provided over the company's secure mobility, cloud, strategic networking and advanced communications platforms, Verizon Enterprise Solutions helps open new opportunities around the world for innovation, investment and business transformation. Visit verizon.com/enterprise to learn more.

Verizon Communications Inc. (NYSE, Nasdaq: VZ), headquartered in New York, is a global leader in delivering broadband and other wireless and wireline communications services to consumer, business, government and wholesale customers.  Verizon Wireless operates America's most reliable wireless network, with nearly 96 million retail customers nationwide.  Verizon also provides converged communications, information and entertainment services over America's most advanced fiber-optic network, and delivers integrated business solutions to customers in more than 150 countries, including all of the Fortune 500.  A Dow 30 company with $111 billion in 2011 revenues, Verizon employs a diverse workforce of 184,500.  For more information, visit www.verizon.com.

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