Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. Dramatically Improves Speed Of Online Rate And Room Availability Checking With Progress Software Object Database Technology

Published 10th May 2006

SLOUGH 10 May 2006 – Leading London hotels such as The Lanesborough, Sheraton Park Tower, Le Meridien and Park Lane Hotel, owned by the Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc, will be among the first to benefit from much improved response times to on-line room pricing and availability enquiries, with the new release of Progress® ObjectStore® Enterprise...

Starwood, which operates the Sheraton, Westin, W Hotels, Four Points by Sheraton, St. Regis, Le Meridien and Luxury Collection brands, is in the process of replacing its legacy mainframe reservation system with a distributed set of applications running on Linux servers and has deployed Progress ObjectStore Enterprise – the world’s most popular object database - to dramatically speed up the throughput of reservation enquiries.

The ObjectStore Enterprise real time object database is embedded in the distributed applications which access the global CRS (Central Reservation System) running on a central Oracle® relational database. This enables persistently required data, used for answering queries, to be stored in the ObjectStore cache and processed at in-memory speeds, which is many times faster than the time taken to query a disc-based relational database record. Where Starwood was experiencing a throughput of hundreds of transactions a minute when accessing its Oracle enterprise database directly, with ObjectStore embedded, it is now achieving a rate of hundreds of transactions per second and the scalability is incomparable, according to Song Park, director of pricing and availability technologies, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc.

The speed of information retrieval now makes it feasible for the pricing and availability of an individual room to be offered as part of the reservation service and enables Starwood to adjust room prices in real time according to supply and demand in order to improve occupancy and yield rates.

“Progress ObjectStore is an integral part of Starwood’s online reservations system,” said Song Park. “Starwood’s high volume, transaction-intensive environment demands extremely fast response times and flexibility. By making ObjectStore part of our service oriented architecture (SOA), which is deployed on Linux (the open source operating system), Starwood has reduced operational costs and improved performance, while maintaining the ability to grow as quickly as business needs require.”

“Technology is playing a vital role in ensuring that Starwood guests receive the highest quality of service when they stay at any of Starwood’s premiere Sheraton, Westin, W Hotels, Four Points by Sheraton, St. Regis and Luxury Collection brands,” said Vanessa Lapins, senior director of emerging systems, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Inc. “Customers choose Starwood based on factors such as the quality and consistency of our services. Progress’ ObjectStore technology, with its in-memory performance, gives us accurate real-time answers to queries for pricing and room availability. Furthermore, Progress gives us the flexibility within our service-oriented architecture (SOA) to scale as our business prospers and grows.”