By Michael Csenger
Network World, 01/04/99

For the sheer gumption it takes to shove a dinosaur out the window, Best Western International deserves praise. For style of execution and resounding impact, it wins an honorable mention in Network World's 1998 User Excellence competition.

In early 1998, Best Western entered the wrap-up phase of a three-year migration from old mainframe-based reservation and business systems to an IP-centric, client/server environment. Every business application and technology thread was cut along the way, then woven back together to build the new fabric.

The payoff so far includes a faster, modernized reservation system credited with helping boost room revenue at Best Western hotels worldwide by roughly $50 million per year. Equally rewarding, the company dodged a $20 million Year 2000 fix by replacing its legacy infrastructure with a 21st century architecture.

Boardroom democracy

The company embarked on its technology refit after putting the matter out to ballot in 1995. An international "lodging brand" that doesn't actually own hotels, Best Western is a nonprofit association serving 3,800 independent owner/operators who pay annual dues and fees to use the Best Western name.

The company supports itself by providing reservation, brand marketing, purchasing and other services to its members. The arrangement works much like a franchise, but members and affiliates call the shots when it comes to funding large projects.

"It's sort of like asking the public to vote for new taxes," says Peter Flack, Best Western's director of technology in Phoenix. "We can't just raise fees on the members to fix the network - they have to agree."

Best Western found itself in the mid-1990s with a technology base that was built during Jimmy Carter's era. With more than 300,000 hotel rooms in 75 countries from Argentina to Zimbabwe, Best Western's business ran on IBM mainframes, dumb terminals and SNA.

The reservation system was based on an archaic Airline Control Program operating system similar to the original SABRE system. It offered a cryptic command-line interface and nothing more, leaving reservation and travel agents thumbing through books or brochures to answer customers' questions about a hotel and its surrounding area.

The company's finances, inventory and other business functions all relied on the same mainframes that housed the reservation application. Members had dealt with the host system long enough and were convinced in 1995 that new client/server technology would better serve them.

"By not doing anything with the system for so long, we were able to do away with it completely when the time finally came," Flack says. "So what we have now isn't a compromise. We turned over our entire technology base for a strong, new infrastructure that's built to last."

Reservation resurrection

Reservations are Best Western's business core. With three reservation centers in the U.S. and two more overseas supporting 4,000 of Best Western's own agents, plus connectivity to the third-party Pegasus global reservation network of airline and travel agents, the old mainframes were overloaded and sluggish. Network response time is critical because outside travel agents can access any hotel booking system and will avoid using one that slows them down. Leapfrogging the competition, Best Western revamped its network architecture to accommodate Executive Technologies' Lynx, a blazingly fast client/server reservation application.

With the help of Compaq consultants who led the technology selection and implementation process, Best Western customized Lynx to meld with the company's unique organization.

Lynx has changed the way Best Western's reservation agents do their jobs. In the past, workers kept a huge stack of travel guides, atlases and printed material to answer customers' questions. Now all that information is available online. A Windows application lets agents find the Best Western hotel closest to a particular tourist attraction, then view a picture of the property or a map of the area. Sales prompts alert users of special promotions or discounts at Best Western hotels around the world.

Delivering subsecond response even during peak periods, the new system gives agents instant access to room availability data. Lynx helps hold room vacancies to a minimum simply by being easier to work with, allowing agents to handle more calls. The deployment also helps Best Western win more business by improving customers' experiences when they call to shop for a hotel room.

"When you look at our increased reservations and consider the costs we avoided by getting rid of the old system, the return on investment for this project is within a couple years," Flack says.

It would have cost more than $20 million to make Best Western's old reservation system Year 2000-compliant, yet the new system only cost $15 million, including consulting fees and training.

Connectivity club

The reservation system uses an Oracle7 database and is housed in Phoenix on a cluster of three Unix-based Digital AlphaServer 8400s linked by Digital's TruCluster software. These servers also support Best Western's other new core business applications, including PeopleSoft Financial modules, Internet and intranet engines and Microsoft Exchange.

The servers run on an FDDI backbone serving 10M bit/sec Ethernet LANs. Best Western's distributed reservation centers access the network via very small aperture terminal (VSAT) satellite links or T-1 lines.

About 300 field personnel can now access Best Western's network through a virtual private network (VPN) based on Compaq's Alta Vista Tunnel software residing on an Alta Vista firewall. VPN users include quality-control inspectors and other corporate staff who must access business applications remotely, but the capability will soon be extended to all users worldwide.

A service provider currently handles Web-based reservations for the organization, but Best Western's next major challenge is to develop its own Web booking engine, a middleware solution to tie the Web server directly to Lynx for online reservations and provide a Web interface to Best Western's other core business applications.

IP expansion

The migration isn't yet complete. Hotels and affiliate offices are linked to Best Western mainly by 28.8K bit/sec dial-up modem connections, while 560 overseas facilities are connected via X.25 VSAT links.

The hotels, Lynx and other business systems communicate over a proprietary protocol, the last vestige of the transition from mainframe to client/server networking. Buried for years at the core of Best Western's WAN requirements, the protocol is easier to work around than to expunge. But because it restricts flexibility, Best Western is working to encapsulate the protocol and run it over IP.

At the same time, Best Western is rolling out a VSAT network to all hotels across North America, replacing the current dial-up modem access with 512K bit/sec downlink and 128K bit/sec uplink capacity.

The plan in 1999 is to convert from a dial-up X.25 network to an IP network running over VSAT and the Internet, Flack says.

Obstacle course

Overall, Best Western's revamped network architecture is straightforward, but the implementation was not. IT began evaluating, choosing and deploying the hardware and software in 1996.

The next year was spent bringing Lynx online. Best Western handles

roughly one million calls per month, so it was vital to thwart possible glitches and ensure that hotels wouldn't accidentally be overbooked during the transition. To do that, Best Western kept the mainframe alive and developed a synchronization program to correlate reservations between the old and new systems.

"It was a nightmare, a necessary evil," Flack says. "But when you look at the magnitude of the project, it's clear that we had to do a slow conversion."

IT sidelined the reservation mainframe at the end of 1996 once agents were using the new system worldwide. Best Western then spent 1997 migrating its other business functions until the swap-out was complete. Finally, the last of the old mainframe programs was shut down for good last January. Flack spent the rest of 1998 tying up loose ends and preparing the IP expansion.

"There was a lot of pain along the way, and we lost some good people," Flack says. "A tremendous number of issues crop up when you swap your technology base in such a short time, and a lot of skilled people left early when they saw what was coming."

Those workers took with them all living knowledge of otherwise forgotten, yet vital, parts of the old system. Too late, Flack and his remaining staff realized their loss and had to bootstrap themselves well enough to get by.

But the greatest challenge was at the end-user level. Getting reservation agents comfortable with the new

technology and teaching them to leverage it is the final measure of Best Western's success.