March 25, 2004

By Stacy Williams, News@Cisco

Hotel reservations should be just a quick phone call away; otherwise, guests may take their business elsewhere. Nowhere is this more apparent than at InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG), the second-largest hotel group in the world with brands such as Crowne Plaza and Holiday Inn.

IHG is a fast-growing company, making frequent acquisitions and building new hotels at a rapid pace. To accommodate this growth, the company needed a metropolitan area network (MAN) to meet demanding technical and budgetary requirements, now and into the future.

IHG manages 515,000 rooms in 3300 hotels located in 100 countries, a data- and telecom-intensive task. More than 1000 employees at IHG's operations center in Atlanta, Georgia, manage information, answer reservation calls, and handle guest check-in and check-out procedures.

IHG's Atlanta network supports the company's reservation and property management systems, financial and human resources, as well as back-office systems. Like many enterprises today, the buildings and data center in Atlanta were interconnected using separate data and voice networks. Both were straining to handle current operations.

Reliance on IHG's local access carrier for data and telecommunications circuits was one of the major hurdles. "We had issues with T1 uptimes and outages," says Allen Rensel, IHG's senior technical advisor for Global Networks. "In our high-growth area, it was not unheard of for another business's expansion to bring down one or more of our services or an entire building."

With local-access carriers and third-party service providers tapped out, adding circuits to the data network was also problematic. IHG was left with limited control over capacity and expansion and at risk of overburdening its network, all at a time when the company planned to build a shared services center. Other business priorities included enhancing data warehousing and customer relationship management (CRM) applications and ensuring uptime of business-critical applications such as reservations management.

The complexity of IHG's separate voice, data, and storage networks led to unwieldy and time-consuming management. Administrative costs mounted because IHG had to deal with a multitude of telecom vendors for contracts, billing, service, and support.

IHG was also paying a minimum of $125 per month in local-access charges for each T1 circuit. According to Rensel, the costs were even higher depending on the vendor and span covered. Along with the numerous T1s, IHG was running voice tie lines across campus buildings at a cost of thousands of dollars per month.

Rensel recognized the opportunity to cut costs and simplify IHG's network using a consolidated infrastructure for voice, data, and storage. Moving to a single telecom vendor would also reduce recurring carrier charges. Other urgent priorities included decreasing reliance on a mix of local access carriers and simplifying the network by consolidating voice, data, and storage traffic. "Demand was clear for a major network redesign," says Rensel.

According to Rensel, point-to-point DS-3 connectivity and traditional wide area network (WAN) options were cost-prohibitive and did not meet IHG's requirements. Optical seemed like the best alternative, but fiber providers were asking for a 10- to 20-year contractual commitment, an unpalatable option given technology's rapid change.

Rensel also recognized the need for IHG to focus on its core competency-running a hotel group versus operating a network. "We felt it was best to let a service provider use its optical expertise to handle this part of our network," says Rensel.

IHG turned to AT&T's ACCU-Ring services, deployed using the next-generation, Cisco ONS 15454 Multiservice Provisioning Platform (MSPP). MSPPs enable service providers such as AT&T to offer customers a high-bandwidth, highly available network infrastructure, dramatically decreasing the time to provision and upgrade services. Compared to legacy platforms, these provisioning platforms drastically improve the efficiency of networks for transporting multiservice traffic because fewer devices are needed. The platforms also simply network management and decrease the resources needed for installation, provisioning, and maintenance.

The network redesign enables IHG to deploy circuits within days versus months. The company can also add and extend data center applications. "Improved bandwidth opens the floodgates for us for new corporate and Internet applications, speedier development, access to disaster recovery solutions and the capability to add offsite processing," says Rensel.

In addition to improved access, control, and bandwidth, the Cisco solution is saving IHG money. Because IHG's own optical network serves as the backbone for all of the company's T1 circuits, monthly local-access charges have been almost eliminated. And, by replacing voice tie lines with DS-3 lines, IHC is running calls over its optical network at one quarter the cost.

IHG hotel guests are also benefiting from faster check-in and check-out times and increased efficiency. "I can't overstate the appeal of one network that supports all services and the ability to bypass the potential drawbacks of the local access loop," says Rensel.

Stacy Williams is a freelance journalist located in Dutch John, UT.