Starwood aims for enterprise Valhalla

When you operate more than 750 hotels — including the Sheraton, St. Regis, W, and Westin brands — your guests naturally expect great service. They also expect equally good service when they book their rooms on the Web, through a call center, or a travel agent.

With a system that processes over $14 billion in bookings per year — including more than $1 billion online — Starwood Resorts knew its ancient COBOL- and IBM mainframe-based reservations system wasn’t up to the job. So the hotelier embarked on a technology refresh called Valhalla, an ambitious five-year plan to transition its core business applications to a services oriented architecture using Unix and Linux platforms.

To manage data flow within the SOA, Starwood chose Actional’s Looking Glass and SOAPstation software because of its low latency and performance-monitoring tools. The hotel giant expects to have the last big piece of Valhalla, its reservation and loyalty system, tested and rolled out by next summer.

By relying on Web services standards, Starwood has increased scalability while slashing maintenance costs, says Tom Conophy, executive vice president and CTO. Starwood anticipates that Actional’s dynamic mapping technology will provide the necessary end-to-end visibility for accurate management.

Conophy expects the new system will save Starwood $15 million to $20 million annually.