Hilton Checks Into New Suite

Computerworld - Hilton Hotels Corp. is in the final stages of a massive system upgrade and conversion but is already saving millions of dollars in operating costs and software license fees. More strategically, the total changeover in its infrastructure -- including server hardware, operating systems, database and application architecture -- will greatly simplify maintenance and support and free up IT staff to concentrate on business process improvements, according to Damien Bean, vice president for corporate systems at Hilton.
The $4 billion, Beverly Hills, Calif.-based lodging company is converting its suite of PeopleSoft 7.5 client/server applications to PeopleSoft 8 on a three-tier, Web-based architecture. It's also scrapping Unix-based Hewlett-Packard Co. servers in favor of Windows 2000 Server boxes from Dell Computer Corp. and replacing its Sybase Inc. databases with SQL Server 2000 from Microsoft Corp.
Hilton merged with Promus Hotel Corp. in December 1999. Today the company owns or manages 300 Hilton hotels and 1,600 properties in the DoubleTree, Embassy Suites, Hampton Inns and Homewood Suites chains. "I was hired in April 2000 to pull the companies together," says Bean. "We had every platform and operating system under the sun."
Just before the merger, in response to the Y2k challenge, Hilton had replaced its local, independent payroll, human resources and financial systems with centralized PeopleSoft 7.5 client/server applications running on HP hardware and Sybase database server software. The resulting production environment was far from bulletproof, Bean says. "It had been a mad scramble because of the Y2k issue, and toward the end they were just slamming things together and hoping for the best," he says.
Human resources, payroll and financial applications at the former Promus hotels, which had been running on IBM AS/400 computers at a central data center in Memphis, were moved to the PeopleSoft-HP-Sybase system as well. But then Hilton made a key decision to put all hotels from both companies on Promus' custom-built, SQL Server-based property management system.
Bean says the two companies had too many servers, operating systems and databases even before they merged. After the merger, the mix of technologies was untenable, a situation not improved by the instability of the production environment. The time had come to streamline, simplify, and standardize in order to cut costs.
Hilton bumped HP in favor of Dell largely for cost reasons. Bean saw Dell servers as commodity boxes that could be had on the cheap and easily replaced with another vendor's Wintel machines anytime a better deal came along. As for databases, "we didn't see Sybase as a strategic platform for