Wyndham Looks to Power Customer Service With eServer
In a move it hopes will improve customer service, Hotel chain Wyndham International Inc. will use IBM’s eServer UNIX-based systems and Shark storage to run its customer-focused business applications.
The high-power systems are expected to help Wyndham employees better respond to guest needs. The servers will support customer service at all of Wyndham’s 165 hotels throughout North America.
"IBM has been the vendor of choice for Wyndham, because of the overall power and performance of its technology," said Gary Owen, VP of IT operations at Wyndham, in a statement. "We chose IBM because our research indicated they make the most powerful Unix and storage systems available in today's market."
Wyndham will purchase three IBM eServer p680's. Two of the systems will operate the company's centralized property-management system. The deployment is intended to help hotel managers to better track reservations and guest needs, as well as provide access to more accurate information on guest arrivals, departures, bills and special requirements. With the new systems, information on room reservations will reside in one central location rather than on a server at each individual hotel location.
The third p680 server from IBM will run Wyndham's yield-management system, which helps hotel operators evaluate the market conditions for rooms in a particular location and better determine pricing. The system is expected to give all parties booking rooms -- travel agents, hotel reservation clerks and guest themselves – real-time information on room availability and pricing.
These new IBM eServer systems join over 70 IBM UNIX servers currently in use at Wyndham. A combination of IBM S80s, H70s and H80s power most of Wyndham's data center, while a series of IBM B50 thin servers manage Wyndham's online-reservation system. In addition, two IBM Shark Enterprise Storage Servers provide a total of 2.5 terabytes of storage.
For more information, visit www-1.ibm.com/servers/ (new window).