The company has moved to the cloud to relieve pressure on its servers and better manage the 14 million visitors it receives every month.

Iomart now hosts all of Skyscanner’s domains globally and the service has enabled the company to rapidly expand with access to additional server resources within minutes.

Iomart says it has seen an increase in travel companies looking to move to cloud-based hosting in the past couple of years and now looks after 15 companies in the sector including onhotels and Stagecoach.

According to a spokesperson, travel is ahead of other industries when it comes to the cloud and attributes this in part to the purely online nature of many companies.

She adds that cloud hosting also means increased flexibility for travel companies helping them manage peaks in demand.

Forget Google and its push into the travel industry for a moment – less talked about is its drive to define how companies handle their web logistics.

One of the latest pushes from Google is for Google Apps, a stable of Google products under one umbrella, refining cloud technology so businesses can reap the benefits of its speed, accessibility and storage.

And in an industry full of skinny startups, perhaps such tools are a must.

So, what are the business benefits?

UK broadcaster ITV recently become a high profile convert to the service, meaning its employees can use Google Mail, Calendar, Google Talk and Google Docs to share and co-author documents.

Advantages include:

1. Cost

One of the most immediate benefits for an SME over traditional desktop software is cost savings. Google Apps includes the advantage of an unlimited number of user accounts, access to all Google’s applications.

2. Email

Gmail is designed so employees can spend less time managing their inboxes, and, by definition, more time being productive – even when they’re not at their desks. The apps offer mobile e-mail, calendar and internet access – with several options for accessing information on the move.

3. Existing kit

For switchers another benefit is that you can continue to use the familiar Microsoft Outlook for email, contacts and calendar as you make the transition to Google equivalents ensuring a smooth transition.

4. Storage

Employees benefit from 25GB of email storage, 50 times more than the usual limits, this allows people to keep important correspondence without having to worry about going over storage limits, as well as accessing them with a built-in search feature while on the move.

5. Reliability

With a 99.9% uptime reliability guarantee, Google claims the Apps will be available continuously, so you and your employees could be more productive. Research indicates that Microsoft Exchange typically has 60 minutes of unplanned downtime per month. Google Apps customers typically experience less than 15 minutes of downtime per month. This could produce some small efficiency savings and could certainly reduce stress levels.

6. Syncing

With synchronous replication, your data and activity in Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Docs and Google Sites is simultaneously preserved in multiple secure data centres. If one data centre is unable to serve your requests, the system is designed to instantly fall back to another data centre that can serve your account with no interruption in service. You’ll be able to access the data stream interchanging between, say, you iPhone, iPad, laptop or PC, Handy for people on the move.

7. Security

Your company’s information will be safe and secure. Many financial services customers trust this system with highly sensitive corporate data.  SME’s can choose from a range of security features including:

• Automatic bespoke spam and mail filtering.
• Information sharing rules to determine how broadly your employees can share with Google Docs, Google Calendar and Google Sites.
• Individual password criteria and visual strength indicators to help employees pick secure passwords.
• Enforced SSL connections with Google Apps to ensure secure HTTPS access.
• Optional email archiving, with up to ten years of retention.

8. Customisation

You can customize Google Apps to meet your own technical, branding and business requirements.  If you do business on-line, integration options let you connect Google Apps to your existing IT infrastructure.  Put another way, with Google Apps your place of business is wherever you and/or your colleagues happen to be. Being in Dubai will effectively be the same as sitting at your desk.

In short, for SME businesses, Google Apps will be a valuable and efficient tool, which is only set to improve as the range of apps on the Google marketplace expands.

In addition, with the arrival of HTML 5 in the next year or two, this will allow approximately 50 times the power of present mobile devices.

Familiarising yourself and your workforce with these apps will put you ahead of the game in terms of making the transition to total mobile data access.

NB: This is a guest post Lee Stretton from SEO and digital marketing advisors AddPeople.

The result is concurforce, a piece of kit that is accessible from handheld devices and the web and allows frequent business travellers to manage their travel and expenses,  interact with colleagues via salesforce chatter and access itineraries via TripIt.

Concur acquired TripIt earlier this year in a deal worth up to $82 million and has since been beavering away on integration.

The idea is that road warriors will save time by having access to the travel and expense, social and sales and CRM technology all on the go thus making them more productive.

Concurforce is not expected to be available until later this year but it is another sign of the demand from the business travel sector for social tools originally associated with the leisure sector.

A study released last week from the American Red Cross showed just how reliant people have become on social media networks for news and information, especially in an emergency.

The Concur Salesforce deal is interesting in light of ongoing debates on corporate strategy on social media  as well as ongoing mobile and data security issues.

If you have expertise in an area, you often want to be associated with others in similar but not competitive fields.

In technology, there is a lot of cross-fertilization that occurs at the board level. While not quite the Japanese Keiretsu model, there are a lot of similar relationships that stem from boards of directors.

So, I was really intrigued by the announcement that Sam Gilliland of Sabre has joined the board of Rackspace.

What has been rather interesting is to question whether or not this is a conflict of direction for Sabre’s CEO. Why?

It is probably worth looking this through the prism of the wider, travel distribution marketplace.

Sabre is one of the three gatekeepers of the closed world of GDS distribution (the other two being Amadeus and Travelport)

It has done a great job over the years in building and then maintaining a secure and restricted marketplace for travel products.

The internet, of course, represents a somewhat different – one could even say anarchic – view of marketplaces. Sabre decided many years ago that owning the physical infrastructure of computing was a commodity and it outsourced its Tulsa data centre (nicknamed the bunker) to HP (formerly EDS).

However, there are a vast number of specialized systems, many on TPF, that still reside in this infrastructure. Sabre also supports a number of the now misnamed Unix type “open systems” in the same location.

From Rackspace’s own website, and the release announcing the appointment of Sam Gilliland to the board:

“Rackspace Hosting is the service leader in cloud computing, and a founder of OpenStack, an open source cloud platform. The San Antonio-based company provides Fanatical Support to its customers, across a portfolio of IT services, including Managed Hosting and Cloud Computing.”

The world is rushing headlong into cloud computing, and away from centrally managed infrastructure.

Cloud computing represents a more efficient use of scarce computing power allowing more standardization at the infrastructure level.

It is also opening up systems so that apps and other user-developed services can be easily adopted at very low cost.

In effect, cloud computing is to industry what democracy was to government.

The adoption of cloud computing is natural for travel – and airlines, in particular, which represent a vast array of users and stakeholders.

Like many markets, it has a relatively small supply footprint and a large consumer footprint combined with a few layers of aggregators. On the web, aggregators are fine. Controlling gatekeepers are not.

So the interesting thing is that here is the CEO of one of the world’s largest gatekeeper companies in travel is joining the board of one of the leading proponents of open cloud based non-gatekeeper infrastructure.

Is Gilliland trying to tell us something?

How appropriate.

It’s all part of LodgeNet’s Envision HD interactive TV platform, which was recently installed in The Chatwal New York, the first such deployment in New York City.

The hotel’s guests can turn on the TV and access City Info, Flight Info, a Weather app, eWelcome, Guest Info, a Happenings Channel, Guest Survey, Property Message and Wake Up service, LodgeNet says.

++++++++++

Internet TV is nothing new for LodgeNet, but the Envision platform “connects the guest-room TV to the cloud,” says spokeswoman Ann Parker.

“This works through a variety of applications that we have created that reach out through the Internet to pull content from cloud-hosted services,” Parker says. “These include applications such as Flight Information and Weather.”

Envision, Parker adds, also enables hoteliers to publish content to the guest room TV through a hosted central location.

At The Chatwell New York, the guests get, in addition to all of the apps, a bunch of HD entertainment options, including Hollywood movies, Parker says.

Parker of LodgeWorks says some of its Envision installations will be testing streaming Internet applications, including access to Pandora and other partner services by the end of 2011.

Of course, hotel guests may welcome the diversity of apps on their guest room TVs even if they are unaware of their cloud origins.

Guests typically are more interested in the clouds than cloud-computing.

This comes at an interesting time for the Dallas-based airline, but it’s also an interesting period for the airline industry. At a time when there is a distribution battle going on for the allegiances of intermediary channels, having an advanced res system is essential.

However, is there a suitable legacy model and process for managing airline reservations? Perhaps the time has come to re-think this.

Southwest’s historic disdain for the global distribution sysstems is legendary, although its attitude has softened with participation in some GDSs.  In that regard, the airline is also now getting an attractive proposition from Travelport to participate in its Universal API.

Officially, the reason for the delayed decision about a new res system is Southwest has too much on its plate, the Dallas Business Journal reports. The airline is running hard and fast to integrate AirTran flights into the core reservations process and this places a significant strain on the Southwest IT team’s scarce resources.

So, it is a prudent move to delay a decision. However, since Southwest has known for some time that it would have to integrate AirTran, one can speculate that this may not be the only reason.  The last time Southwest found itself tasked with airline integrations was when it acquired Salt Lake- based Morris Air in 1993 and the assets of Muse/Transtar airlines in the 19980s.

Given recent glitches in the overall IT infrastructure at Southwest, there may be a number of other issues at stake.

CEO Gary Kelly is on record as stating that a new Passenger Service System would provide Southwest with international capabilities, and the airline had reduced its short list to two players — Amadeus and Sabre.

The selection process has been very laborious. That would be natural for “normal” airlines such as the network carriers. But Southwest has carved a different path and grown to be the largest (by passenger numbers) domestic US airline.

The reservations selection process has dragged on for more than a year. That is light years for a company whose agility and speed is legendary.

In the interim, Southwest will be going for a little more “Luv” from Sabre,  which will be doing modest upgrades to Southwest’s res system, including adding some international quick fixes for Mexico and other nearby international locations.

Sabre declined to comment about this work.

There are many major PSS players. Southwest uses a hybrid and customized system. Some of this stems from the old Braniff system (called COWBOY) which Sabre acquired after the collapse of the Dallas-based airline in the 1980s.

As noted earlier, Southwest is evaluating both Amadeus and Sabre’s PSS offerings.

Amadeus Altea was largely built from scratch over the last decade and is still incorporating major pieces of functionality. Amadeus of late has won a large share of the PSS RFPs in the market — a situation that has prompted some calls for the company to separate its two businesses.

Amadeus has two sub versions of its PSS: one for low cost carriers, which Norwegian Air Shuttle is using, and a specialized Atltea version called the Common IT Platform, which was customized for the Star Alliance. Major Altea users in Europe include British Airways, Air France/KLM, and Lufthansa. In Asia/Pacific, the Altea airlines include  Singapore Airlines, Cathay Pacific and Qantas. Some  are in the process of implementation.

However, in North America, Amadeus’ lone customer, United Airlines, cancelled the contract, leaving  Madrid-based Amadeus looking for a North America customer.

Sabre’s PSS is SabreSonic.It was upgraded in recent years and has won over several former low cost carriers migrating to a hybrid model. Recent wins for Sabre include Canada’s WestJet, Mexico’s Volaris and JetBlue in the USA. Sabre will be losing its largest customer, American Airlines, to HP, once American Airlines’ new system, Jetstream, is ready.

Southwest Airlines confronts a dilemma that most airlines now face. Over the past 15 years, the Web has increased the complexity of airline passenger IT infrastructure. The common wisdom was to have a two-tier solution with the PSS handling most major infrastructure and core functionality, and Web-based systems tasked with being the passenger interface.

This two tier model has now morphed into a bus-like structure with common systems for planning and management, business intelligence data services, customer management/loyalty, check in systems and PSS functions sitting on servers inside the airline’s own environment or within that of their outsourced IT providers. The Web-based Internet booking engine  is usually far more sophisticated than just being a front end to these systems.

Indeed it has become more in vogue to invest in these non-PSS systems rather than in the core monolithic PSS mainframe-based systems of old. There are many current demands on scarce IT resources inside airlines. The need for speed of deployment in a climate of rapid change — mobile and social media — have placed further constraints and demands on the IBM TPF (now zTPF)-based mainframes used to host most airline PSSs.

Southwest realizes that with its growth it will be a gut-wrenching process to move to a new res system despite its relatively simplistic model.

But perhaps the days of the monolithic PSS are over.

With distribution fragmenting and the importance of an actively managed multi-channel distribution strategy essential for all carriers, the possibility of transitioning to a more distributed cloud-based solution will probably cause Southwest to rethink its next foray.

One can clearly infer that there was no easy answer for Southwest or they would have made a decision by now. The demands of consumer-based airfare search, with its accompanying increases in traffic, are placing huge strains on every airlines’ IT infrastructure, and it will never diminish.

Other strains include demands for unbundled and ancillary services (yes, even Southwest has those), mobile and social, and all of these requirements should cause all airlines to rethink the old model of massive-scale solutions.

Instead they should be looking at agile environments and the cloud as ways to move to a more commercially sustainable set of IT solutions.

The days of 5-10 year PSS contracts must surely be threatened.

After all, who can say what the airline IT world will be like commercially in 2 years — let alone five or 10.

Perhaps Southwest is making a good decision at the right time.

As I expected in my lead-in article for HITEC, cloud computing was among the most discussed topics at this year’s show and the subject of one of the better attended educational sessions.

The cloud computing “supersession” was moderated by Horseshoe Bay Resort CIO, Lyle Worthington and featured a diverse group of panelists, including Rackspace CTO John Engates, Infor’s SVP of R&D Javier Buzzalino, PAR Springer-Miller President and CEO Larry Hall, and Charles Henderson, Trustwave’s director of application security services.

The presentations were pretty wide ranging in scope and depth, providing a little something for everyone. Rackspace’s Engates did a nice job of setting the context with a “Cloud 101″ presentation.

As fast as cloud computing adoption is growing – Rackspace’s cloud business was roughly $50 million in 2010 with a base of 60,000 customers – Engates predicted that enterprise adoption will reach 50% of all computing infrastructure by 2015.

Even as we’re near the top of the cloud hype cycle, that seemed high, until Engates clarified (over Twitter, from the podium) that the prediction included private and hybrid cloud implementations.

PAR’s participation was pretty timely given that it launched its cloud based next generation hospitality management system, called ATRIO Guest Experience Management, a few days before the start of the show.

ATRIO, developed for PAR Springer-Miller by a third party, was a ground-up development effort built on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform.

The effort began in Q4 2008, taking more than 2.5 years.  It was a big bet by PAR at a time of great financial uncertainty in the economy, but they hope it pays off. Initially PAR expected that 80%-85% of new deployments would be cloud based, but today believe that virtually all new implementations (98%-99%) will be based on ATRIO.

For me the pièce de résistance was the presentation by Infor’s Buzzalino who leads Infor’s 600-person R&D organization.

He didn’t just go deep, he went Jules-Verne-Journey-to-the-Center-of-the-Earth deep into application architecture for the cloud.

Buzzalino discussed the benefits of multi-tiered architectures, the impact of multi-tenancy on scalability, the benefits of the NoSQL movement has for the cloud (traditional SQL databases were not designed for the cloud and horizontal partitioning only gets you so far), and many other topics.

One angle that he discussed, which I thought was particularly intriguing, was the role of “governors” in a multi-tenant environment.

These governors put restrictions on what one tenant can do to ensure that they don’t consume so many computing resources that it crushes the application performance for other customers.

For me, Buzzalino’s presentation was outstanding not only in its technical depth, but that he was able to make the concepts accessible to the members of the audience who were not architects (that means all of us).

And even though some of the content may have went over the heads of parts of the audience, you couldn’t help but leave the presentation feeling impressed by the technical leadership of the Infor team and confident that they’re providing a true enterprise-class solution.

At its Air Transport IT Summit in Brussels last week,  SITA announced a partnership with Orange Business Services to jointly develop a “managed cloud computing infrastructure”.

SITA calls it the ATI Cloud [PDF] (Air Transport Industry Cloud).

Cloud computing, of course, isn’t new. Essentially it is on-demand computing paid for by the drip rather than for the individual component of hardware, software and managed services. It is a shared platform on which computing resources are provided to a wide array of users over a common infrastructure.

The community cloud concept would make sense for SITA and its large airline customer base. SITA has always had a community-based pricing structure. Airlines share many resources. They share airline services and inter-connect at many points.

Many airlines are also focused on being more efficient and outsourcing everything that is not core to their operations.

At the conference, Lufthansa CIO Christoph Klingenberg supported the concept of cloud computing, saying airline IT development of all kinds should be outsourced.

Cynics in the audience may view the SITA initiative as another attempt by IT vendors to boost IT spending and line their pockets after several lean years.

But, the logic for cloud-based computing is inescapable. While the business case is largely about the cost, the cloud is not just about dollars and cents. Cloud computing also simplifies the use of computing assets; it enables rapid deployment and makes IT accountable to the speed of business.

Airlines need flexibility and scalable IT services. Airport IT services, for example, need to accommodate a range of capabilities for  a single flight operation a few times a week and to scale it into a 24/7 hub-type operation. In irregular operations, as occurred during the 2010 winter storms and ash clouds, the nature of operations may change with only hours’ notice.

The goals of the SITA airline cloud are admirable. The widely quoted 100ms (milliseconds) speed should be welcomed by airline executives who remember ALC terminals with sub-2 second response times as standard in the days of hardwired dumb green screen terminals (such as the Westinghouse 1642s).

Plus the ability to set up a new access to your reservations system within minutes rather than days and weeks, for example, would enable flexibility that airlines can only dream about.

However, the airlines and SITA’s managers must not impose the same legacy thinking that has held back innovation in the airline IT space, particularly in distribution.

In Brussels there was a lot of talk comparing airlines (not favourably) to Apple. Lauding Apple’s rise to the top, many speakers used words like “agility” and “focus.”

And this is where things could go awry. Apple imposes strict and commercially harsh terms on its vendors and users. The better model would probably be Amazon’s open cloud-based computing environment.

Unfortunately, SITA already is talking about a certification process. Such a process would  restrict innovation and result in the perpetuation of the lowest common denominator approach.

It would be better for SITA to make the platform open and encourage its use for services not constrained to airlines alone. This is where standards will be important, but they should enable –not restrict — innovation and meet the needs of the business.

Airlines have been slow to adopt cloud computing, but the announcement from SITA and its partner, Orange (aka France Telecom), will legitimize the cloud community approach.

Cloud computing also has long-term implications for airline IT, especially Passenger Service Systems (central airline reservations systems), which typically are hugely expensive and protracted projects.

Klingenberg of Lufthansa matter-of-factly spoke about his new 200 million euro DCS (Departure Control System). Another speaker spoke about his 5-6 year project to deliver a new reservations system.

Cloud computing promotes agility and rapid deployment. Application development is about light, small and fast.

SITA would do well to ensure that its commercial model for cloud computing is structured to promote the agility that has come to characterize the B2C marketplace for apps from Apple, Google and others. This approach enables users to download a new version of the app either on demand or automatically without any computing skills at all.

For the airline business, this will provide many benefits if the processes and management also change. Without this radical change, the benefits of cloud computing will at best be muted, and  at worst lost or wasted altogether.

Cloud computing is about decentralization benefiting any user type as well as complex computer applications.

The promise of a totally flexible platform will also alleviate the needs for centralized services such as GDSs and encourage open distribution models.

With this approach, airlines would be able to reduce their dependency on monolithic systems and their attendant cost models, get closer to their customers and regain control of their product supply systems.

IBM did just that and surveyed 3,000 of them in its 2011 IBM Global CIO study, which found that CIO interest in cloud computing notched the greatest category increase compared with results from its survey two years earlier.

And, if you consider virtualization — when virtual servers are created on a single piece of hardware — part of a private cloud strategy, and you should, then interest is even greater in cloud technologies than the chart indicates.

It is fitting then that cloud computing will be one of the key themes at the 2011 HITEC conference in Austin, Texas, Frank Wolfe, CEO Hospitality Financial and Technical Professionals, which produces the show. Companies including Choice Hotels, PAR Springer-Miller and Newmarket International will be amongst those promoting their cloud offerings at HITEC. Choice described its cloud initiative here.

However, in most cases, I wouldn’t expect to see hoteliers deploy their own cloud instances, but they are more likely to use CRS, PMS and RMS systems via a Software-as-a-Service model.  Cloud/SaaS can bring many advantages over on-premise solutions for hoteliers. Among them:

• Conversion of CapEx (capital expenditure) to OpEx (operational expenditure);

• Access to the latest version without the pain often associated with upgrades;

• Removal of the burden of application and infrastructure management; and

• Potential for heightened security beyond internal capabilities.

I’ve heard some in the industry voice concerns regarding availability, security and disaster recovery. And, Wolfe notes that part of HFTP’s role is to help educate its members about the pros and cons of cloud computing and help eliminate misinformation, which fuels fear, uncertainty and doubt.

I understand that hoteliers worry about being cut off from their PMS and not being able to check in guests, or their CRS and not being able to take reservations, which can be disastrous given that room nights are a perishable good.  Further, I can understand how events such as cloud outages and the ensuing headlines can fan the  flames.

The cloud does not fix poorly designed applications automagically, but good software design and architecture can address availability and security issues and it must take the computing environment into consideration.

As I’ve written before, that’s why you need to understand your software provider’s architecture.

But in evaluating whether to choose a cloud/SaaS solution over on premise you also need to do an honest evaluation of your own IT organization’s ability to manage your infrastructure. Google’s cloud-based Gmail service offers 99.984% availability, which is 46 times better than the average Microsoft Exchange implementation.

In addition, the cloud is being used by the federal government and financial institutions, both of which likely have stricter, more complicated regulatory requirements than most hotels.

And, major cloud platforms offer better physical and network security than virtually all hotel chains can provide.  These examples show that the cloud is not inherently less secure or less available than on premise solutions.

So, that being said, what are the six questions that you should ask hospitality software suppliers about their cloud offering, whether you’re at HITEC or not:

1. Is it really cloud? You may think this a bit pedantic, but there is an awful lot of cloud-washing going on in the enterprise software business, so there’s no reason to think that hospitality software should be any different. There is so much buzz about “the cloud” that some may use the term while not implementing their solution in a public cloud manner. Some may simply be offering a hosted model in their own datacenters. They may employ some of the public cloud techniques like virtualization, but this is not necessarily the same thing. Some of the key aspects of real cloud offerings include: infinite bi-directional elasticity; pay for what you use; and detailed monitoring and reporting (governance)

2. Do you have Service Level Agreements on RTO/RPO? OK, let’s start with a few definitions. RTO  is Recovery Time Objective and RPO is Recovery Point Objective. These are critical disaster recovery attributes. Bascially they translates into how fast will you get my application back up and how far back in time are you backing up my data. If vendors don’t have SLAs on RPO then they’re likely not using continuous data protection techniques and you have a greater risk of losing data if the app crashes.

3. What are the availability SLAs? It’s one thing to quote uptime in marketing materials, but at some point you have to put your money where your mouth is. The penalties never truly make up for the loss of service, but it gives you your best indication of what you can expect and the basis for how you should evaluate that performance against an existing solution.

4. Is there an offline mode? Just because something is cloud-based doesn’t mean it only works when you’re online. There are techniques that can enable some level of offline functionality and then automatically synchronize when you’re back online.

5. What about integration? A PMS or a CRS have to talk with other solutions, whether it be restaurant, golf facility, spa or accounting systems. One of the challenges in the early days of SaaS in the enterprise was that it was difficult to knit together different systems. Some companies build their own integrations, others use platforms like Boomi (acquired by Dell last year). But you need to find out what systems they integrate with automatically and check that against the other systems that you need to connect with. If there are gaps, ask the company how it will help you close them.

6. How can I get my data back out? This is what I call the Hotel California syndrome. Software providers will gladly tell you how easy it is to get onboard, but rarely are they forthcoming about how you can get your data back out. Some refer to this as data portability. It’s critically important as you may need to change systems if you change flags or if you just don’t like the way the platform works. Be sure you are comfortable with the flexibility provided.

Cloud computing can be a very useful tool for hoteliers. But before you make the move, be sure that you ask the right questions and get the right answers when choosing a platform.

—–

Note: Glenn Gruber is attending HITEC for Tnooz and Ness Technologies.

In fact, Stephen Joyce, president and CEO of Choice, claims the company’s choiceAdvantage, a Web-based central reservation system, is the only cloud-based property management system massively distributed globally.

That’s the pitch that Joyce made to analysts yesterday at the Goldman Sachs Lodging, Gaming and Leisure Conference 2011 in New York City.

Choice Hotels, which is a pure-play franchisor of hotels, mostly in the moderate and budget tiers, has deployed choiceAdvantage in Australia and the UK this year, and is looking to push it into France and Germany later in 2011, Joyce says.

The system is currently used in 4,000 hotels globally, Joyce says.

“With our technology platform, if you have a connection to the Web, you have a connection to our technology platform,” Joyce says.

He claims a hotel deploying choiceAdvantage may spend $10,000 to train employees compared with hotels installing other systems and paying $300,000 for servers, server cables, air-conditioning for the servers and technicians to oversee the servers.

On the technology front, Joyce says Choice also is also building technology hubs for higher levels of connectivity with all of its distribution channels, and the combination of choiceAdvantage and the hub development will improve franchisor’s value proposition.

Part of that value proposition, Joyce says, is Choice’s distribution clout. He says Choice regularly generates about 30% to 35% of a franchisee’s business.

Choice currently franchises about 5,000 hotels in the U.S. and another 1,100 in 35 countries, including Australia, the U.K., France, Germany, Brazil and Japan.

The brands include Comfort Inn, Comfort Suites, Quality, Sleep Inn, Clarion, Cambria Suites, MainStay Suites, Suburban, EconoLodge, Rodeway Inn and Ascend.

Some say that their customers don’t care about how the software is built. They are buying business solutions, not technology. They say all customers care about is whether they can turn on and off, purchase based on usage and don’t have to care about scalability and reliability.

But, just because customers don’t care about understanding the technology very deeply, and shouldn’t have to care how about the details on their software provider runs their technology operations is a very different statement than saying that the architecture model isn’t important to them.

So here are the top 10 reasons that you should care about how your travel technology provider builds and operates their products:

1. Lower cost.

Okay, this goes first because it’s what people usually care about most. Cloud and Multi-tenancy are huge levers to reduce the cost of delivering the application and therefore the number one way in which a travel technology company can reduce the costs to users.

Developing a single code-base rather than maintaining several different flavors, managing a homogenous infrastructure, increasing utilization of computing resources via a shared infrastructure all contribute to keeping costs down.

2. Higher application availability and reliability.

System architecture has a massive impact on both availability and reliability. Wait…aren’t these the same thing? No. Availability means whether or not you have access to the application at a given point in time.

Reliability deals with the inherent stability of the platform – how often will it fail. Your technology vendor can hide unreliable software with multiple redundant systems, keeping the application available, but the cost of establishing and maintaining those redundant systems can jack up the prices to you.

3. Better scalability.

For some customers may seem to be less of an issue than it really is. If you have a limited inventory (e.g. a 6-room B&B) to sell and your individual business growth is inherently limited, you may not feel the need for a highly scalable application.

But very often your technology vendor is supplying the same application to many customers. If they are successful they will have many clients and experience rapid growth. So can they add all those customers without impacting the service they provide you?

When dealing with perishable inventory a system crash because of scale can leave you with an outage and a potential for lost sales which can never be recovered.

4. Faster implementation time.

This is a very big issue. The cost of implementation of software is often multiples of the initial acquisition cost. And depending on the level of complexity, it can also take a very long time to get you up and running, delaying you from receiving the value of the software.

Typically SaaS uses a configuration rather than a customization model to implementation which greatly reduces implementation timelines. Similarly, application consistency can also reduce training costs.

5. Vendor sustainability.

This may be perhaps the most important aspect. Architecture matters because it goes to the sustainability of the platform. In a recent post, noted SaaS blogger Phil Wainwright wrote about multi-tenancy:

“To say that multi-tenancy is only of interest to vendors and has no relevance to customers is a bit like saying Wintel compatibility is only of interest to PC manufacturers, and so customers should not worry about it.

“Try telling that to the enterprises that invested and wasted millions of dollars in rolling out DEC Rainbows or IBM PS/2 Microchannel machines in the mid- and late 1980s. If a vendor is selling you a proprietary dead-end that will be obsolete before its time, I’d say that’s a factor of huge importance to customers. Don’t let anyone tell you any different.”

6. Faster introduction of new features.

Multi-tenant applications utilize a single code base which improves the efficiency of the development operations. While sharing a common code base amongst a diverse user base can result in varied requests for new features, it also helps identify the most commonly request features and deliver those to market more quickly.

7. Quality of service.

The homogeneity of infrastructure, application and database enables providers at each step of the chain to offer more granular and specific Service Level Agreements including Quality of Service which can enable you to support the requirements of your business.

8. Improved performance.

If you’re using an on-demand application, a major impact on an individual’s perception of the application’s performance is related to network latency – how long does it take to send data back and forth to the main server. The big cloud providers spread the infrastructure over multiple geographies and even effectively move the app around the globe in a follow the sun mode, to reduce latency and improve the user’s productivity. This can also ameliorate need for employing CDNs (Content Delivery Networks like Akamai) which in turn may reduce cost.

9. Reduced integration challenges.

Integration is a very big issue for large and small companies alike. The architectural choices a travel technology provider makes has a big impact on how well they can support integration with other applications that the solution needs to interact with.

10. Better disaster recovery.

This is largely an operational issue rather than a technical one. Using a shared infrastructure and common application and database schema reduces the cost of DR.

So nearly 2,000 words later (including Part One), do you have a different view than when you started reading?

Primarily the discussion revolved around the importance of Cloud Computing, Software-as-a-Service and multi-tenancy… and a little confusion about what each of these terms mean.

Some argued that the customer shouldn’t care, as long as the software works as advertised. But in my view that’s too loose of a definition and short-sells some of the operational and reliability implications that may result from certain architectural approaches.

Given this issue was a recent (and ongoing) debate amongst leading analysts and technologists on the Enterprise Irregulars blog, it made me doubly confident that this was an important issue that should be discussed and debated in travel industry circles.

And while I recognize that a significant portion of the travel industry isn’t particularly technology savvy (eg. tour and activity operators, bed and breakfast and small inn owners), the choices they make regarding reservation systems, accounting and operations software is vitally important to becoming a profitable operation.

So no matter what size and organization you are or whether you’re a buyer or supplier of travel technology, keep reading.

Now in case you’re not yet sure where I come out in the argument, I think architecture matters…a lot. Why?

• If you’re a buyer of travel technology, the technology choices of your supplier goes directly to the sustainability of your vendor, their ability to deliver their solution at the right cost and the performance and functionality you require – now and into the future.
• If you’re a provider of travel technology, it’s a question of whether you’re positioning yourself appropriately to meet the future needs of your customers. Especially given the pervasive use of legacy technology in the industry.

Let’s begin with a few definitions that will be helpful in providing context (sorry if this becomes too rudimentary for some, but I want to ensure everyone has a common understanding before continuing):

Cloud Computing

This is maybe one of the more misunderstood and (sometimes intentionally) mis-used technology-related terms today. Many companies may try to cast their applications as Cloud Computing to cash in on all the hype and confusion. This attempt at mis-direction is called “cloudwashing”.

Cloud Computing is the aggregation of leverages a shared Internet-based infrastructure (Infrastructure-as-a-Service  or IaaS) with an integrated integration, middleware and development environment (Platform-as-a-Service or PaaS), with the application layer residing on top (Software-as-a-Service or SaaS) represented by the graphic here (source: Christopher Hoff).

Cloud Computing, as defined by the National Institute for Science and Technology, is:

On-demand self-service

• Automated Self provisioning

Broad network access

• Available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms (e.g. mobile phones, laptops)

Resource pooling

• Multi-tenant model
• Physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to demand.
• The customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the resources

Rapid elasticity

• Rapid and elastic provisioning
• Resource provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be purchased in any quantity at any time.

Measured Service

• Metered billing
• Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported providing transparency

Some of the key benefits of Cloud Computing include:

• Convert CapEx to OpEx: Typical on premise infrastructure requires a company to continually invest in servers, storage and related hardware and software to operate their software using capital dollars. These purchases need to be made to both replace aging equipment, but also to add capacity as required by the needs of the business.  In the public Cloud model, these investments are borne by the IaaS provider and the company only pays for the compute resources they consume using operating budget dollars.
• Dynamic Scalability: The needs of a business are not static. Naturally, many companies have peak load requirements that often spike for short durations.  The Cloud Computing model allows a company to dynamically bring computing resources online to meet those needs, but then wind them down when no longer required. This is particularly valuable when unforeseen spikes occur and you don’t have the ability to wait the 2 weeks (or months) for the standard hardware procurement cycle…which could result in lost sales. And in the travel industry where much of the inventory is perishable, that’s often revenue you can’t get back.
• Enhanced Computing Efficiency:  Many companies have highly under-utilized computing resources (often < 40% utilization).  Cloud computing relies heavily on virtualization technologies which enable a much more efficient environment. Many companies also use virtualization in their own infrastructure, but are still somewhat limited in the levels they can achieve because they are only dealing with their own applications, while a Cloud provider can aggregate the needs of many customers to drive utilization higher and costs per computing resource down.
• Metered Billing: When you combine the benefits of the first three bullets, you need a metered billing mechanism to pass those benefits on to the consumers of the service. Metered billing allows the Cloud provider to charge based on computing resources consumed enabling companies to turn indirect costs into variable costs, so that they match more closely to the growth of the business and optimize margins, which are already thin enough in the travel industry.
• Automated Provisioning: is what makes the Cloud paradigm work. Rather than requiring the intervention of IT staff to bring new resources online, Cloud infrastructure can spin up new resources in minutes rather than hours or sometimes days.

While originally envisioned using a common infrastructure over the public Internet, another variation has emerged called “Private Cloud” promulgated by hardware vendors and traditional hosting providers which leverages a dedicated infrastructure that is either hosted remotely or on servers within an individual company’s premises.

Private Cloud however loses some of the key benefits of the Cloud paradigm, mainly scalability on demand and the ability to eliminate the need for capital expenditures.  There may also be negative impacts on disaster recovery and continuity of operations as well.  And there is a whole conversation to be had about Public v. Private v. Hybrid Clouds and how they differ from traditional hosted infrastructure, but that’s a whole ‘nother post.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)

SaaS denotes a computing environment where multiple customers access the software application over the Internet.

Often times it is delivered using a shared infrastructure, a single-code base, classically using a Multi-Tenant architecture where all customers share a common application instance and database  – at least from an architectural ‘canon’ perspective, this is the best way to approach it.

A key element is also the automatic provisioning of new clients – where they can basically get started right away without manual intervention.

This is similar to automated provisioning in Cloud Computing except we’re dealing with on-boarding customers, not spinning up new hardware to dynamically meet the infrastructure demands that the new customers may require.

SaaS also employs a consumption-based model for billing, either via a monthly subscription or a fee-per-transaction model as opposed to the typical software license plus maintenance.

This differs from the Application Service Provider (ASP) model which provides a hosted single-instance of the application and database for each customer.

Some say that Saas and Cloud based are somewhat akin to next gen ASP, but to me that’s like saying Neanderthals are somewhat akin to homo sapiens.  The differences are large and important.

NB: In part two we provide the top ten reasons why you care about your tech provider’s architecture.

In his keynote address at TravelCom in Dallas, Woodside, Google’s vice president of American operations, says travel companies will have to eat their own dog feed — i.e. constantly test and tweak the solutions they’ve created — as they meet head-on looming disruptions in search, video, mobile and cloud computing.

Search: Woodside says search will have to become richer, more social and global as consumers seek user-generated content and video about their travel experiences.

“The way you think of search has to evolve,” Woodside says.

Video: Woodside says video will evolve into a more flexible advertising mode as half of all video will be addressable to certain consumers or segments instead of the current 30-second spot with a one-size fits all approach.

For example, the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority would be able to make inroads by advertising on the Web certain racy shows or attractions out in the desert in a more cost-effective way than is done today, he says.

Travel marketers would be able to reach much larger audiences with video at various price points than is the current norm today, Woodside says.

Mobile: In the long term, some 30% of online bookings will come from mobile devices, Woodside says.

In fact, he argues, “we think it [mobile] will become more important than the PC.”

Even Google feels a threat from mobile, Woodside says, and it will have to adapt all of its services for mobile or become “less relevant.”

Cloud computing: Most travel marketers will have to migrate their services to cloud computing, which will be another disruptive force, Woodside says.

So, hold onto your hats, break out your smartphone and pass the dog food.