THE CENTERFOLD

Holiday Inn's Hospitable Network Worldwide

After a busy day at a trade show, a good night's sleep is a luxury. Abusiness traveler staying at a Holiday Inn is supported not only by a mattress,but also by a heterogeneous network that serves the chain's 10,000 employeesin 56 countries. While Holiday Inn's goal is to provide the same level ofservice and technology at every Holiday Inn location, having a worldwidenetwork means it must contend with international political structures. Forinstance, in certain Middle Eastern and former Communist countries, politicalcontrols over commerce do not allow for network connectivity, and telephoneservice can be rare.

Depending on its location, a hotel may have a Personal Earth Station anda VSAT connection. In countries that forbid satellites, Cisco routers andT1 or frame relay links are used. To support the variety of client/serverand host-based applications, a multiprotocol mix of TCP/IP, SNA, IPX, NetBIOSand DECnet is required. To achieve worldwide connectivity, the Holiday Innnetwork is connected via VSAT, frame relay, ISDN, X.25, point-to-point privatecircuits and some dial-up. A Cabletron SPECTRUM network management system,Network General Distributed S niffer System and redundant backbones supplementnetwork management. In the event of a disaster, the VSAT service would bemoved to a hub in Chicago, and the applications would be served from a mainframein New York.

A call to 1-800-HOLIDAY reaches a reservation center in Raleigh, N.C., SaltLake City or Amsterdam, where Holiday Inn agents use a reservation systemcalled Holidex running on IBM ES/9000 mainframes on a Transaction ProcessingFacility (TPF) operating system. Encore, the domestic Unix-based front desksystem, and LANmark, the international hotels' NetWare-based system, arecustom applications that run on Token-Ring networks domestically and NetWareand UnixWare networks internationally. A TCP/IP gateway links the Unix orNetWare hosts to the mainframe. These property management applications trackinventory, reservations and guest check-in and check-out. Holiday Inn ismoving some of its mainframe applications, such as Holidex, to a distributedclient/server architecture for improved data throughput worldwide.

A variety of database applications keeps Holiday Inn running smoothly forcorporate employees in Atlanta, international sales offices and hotels.A Holiday Inn Rate Optim ization Database (HIRO) application assists HolidayInn's general managers in pinpointing their optimum room rate, based onthe number of guests, stay statistics, area cost of living and busiest timeof year. HIRO resides on a SPARCcenter 2000.

Holiday Inn also uses a direct marketing application, based on a Red Brickdata warehouse, to attract people to lodge at a Holiday Inn location. Usinga database of all the college graduations occurring around the country andinformation on parents who live out of town, the chain can direct-marketparents who may be traveling. Red Brick exists on an RISC 6000 platform.A priority club application called Frequency Marketing Delivery System (FMDS)tallies all of the hotel's frequent guests and their priority club pointsfor prize distribution. FMDS is housed on an MVS mainframe.

Traveler s can make online Holiday Inn and Crown Plaza reservations on theWorld Wide Web site and see advertising, read letters to the chairpersonor play a trivia game for prizes ( www.holiday-inn.com , www.crownplaza.com ).



April 1, 1996