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Enterprise Software Solution for Leading Hotel Reservation Company
Company
The client is one of Europe's leading hotel reservations and event management agency. The client has numerous blue chip companies as its customers and books over 2 million room nights worldwide every year.
Challenge
Since the client’s IT Infrastructure had not kept pace with the changes in technology the ERP backbone for the business was outdated. There were disparate systems with one system for managing supplier information and another for managing client information. Further, customers could only post their booking requests. The booking processing as well as confirmation processing was being carried out manually in the background leading to an adverse effect on response time.
Solution
In order to address the above challenges, Calsoft proposed a solution where the client's entire system would be replaced by a re-engineered integrated solution. Since the task was enormous and complex, the system development was broken down into phases with several modules in each phase building-up to a final re-engineered solution. Calsoft consultants understood the client's priorities and helped the client in making a plan for the entire solution development. Since the client required a secure and scalable solution with minimum investment on proprietary software and licenses, Calsoft suggested the development of the new hotel reservation software system on J2EE Technology with Linux, JBoss and SQL server as the development environment.
Standards were laid-down for the entire development and individual projects were developed as per these standards. The modules were built in an n-tier architecture with each module communicating to the other module strictly through XML messages. This design allowed individual modules to be developed, extended and if needed replaced at a later date with minimum impact on the other modules. Different modules and different tiers can even run on different servers and operating systems. Data from the old-system was migrated to the new system as and when a module was completed and the system went live. The developed modules were delivered with extensive documentation to reduce maintenance cost and cut down time on time required for enhancements. Thus Calsoft brought down the total cost of ownership for the client using open-source software and packages while developing a true platform-independent application software for room booking, hotel reservation, and other custom requirements.
Customizable Online Booking Solution
To maintain its competitive edge the client wanted to offer a customizable online booking solution to its corporate and retail customers. As one of the projects for the client, Calsoft built an online booking solution through which a corporate or retail customer can make a hotel room booking, amendment or cancellation in any of thousands of hotel groups / hotels in the UK. The solution comes with a customizable user-interface for different customers and provides a powerful search engine with intuitive map-based search features. Further, customers can get the best of yearly contractual rates vs off-season and special offer rates from various hotels in real-time.
Benefits
- Reduced development, maintenance and total cost of ownership
- Ability to ramp-up and down the team based on the life-cycle of the project as per project plan
- Rapid response to key tenders with the ability to meet difficult time-to-market and tender requirements
- Client IT team augmented with an extended IT team from Calsoft
- Better control over the projects when compared to a totally outsourced application development model