By Emily Jacobs
Travel publisher Lonely Planet is reportedly moving away from SAP R/3 and Salesforce as part of a move to a more “nimble, simplified” operating model.
Chief technology officer Gus Balbontin told iTnews that they would be replacing the platform with NetSuite’s hosted OneWorld suite.
“We haven’t yet decided exactly how we are going to do it, but the idea is to do the band aid approach as quickly as we can,” said Balbontin.
He told the online magazine that they would begin planning the transition in the next two weeks and expects it to be completed by July 2014.
Lonely Planet currently hosts its own SAP enterprise resource planning operations for its global operations.
However, Balbontin indicated he wasn’t interested in housing equipment and systems internally and had a strategy to “release ourselves from physical dependencies and infrastructure.”
“Every time you need to move an office or every time someone needs to go to work from another place, it’s always painful,” he said.
The replacement of SAP and Salesforce is just one of the changes being implemented in the publisher’s IT operations.
“We’re consolidating a bunch of ordering systems too, and even payroll systems,” said Balbontin.
“At the moment, we’re doing the due diligence to consider moving to Google Apps as well, so we’ll be moving away from Exchange.”
Earlier this year, Lonely Planet was sold by the commercial arm of the BBC to NC2 Media.
