Different countries, different operators require Accor a more nuanced Cloud strategy in system transitioning efforts.
Accor Cloud Strategy
With a growing portfolio of hotels and brands in Southeast Asia, Accor wants to reduce hardware and is willing to scale its services across future hotels.
So the French hotel group started its Cloud strategy for hotels in Southeast Asia by the end of 2019. “Although the majority of hotels in ASEAN today still use on-premises servers, the current Cloud strategy is to open new hotels mainly with cloud computing and gradually migrate existing hotels to the cloud ”- Khang Nguyen Trieu, Chief Technology Architect at Accor, said.
Accor manages more than 5,100 hotels in 110 countries around the world. In the Asia-Pacific region, Accor has 1,200 hotels in 22 countries including many brands: Sofitel, Pullman, MGallery, Novotel, Mercure and Ibis.
The company begins adopting its Cloud strategy with new hotels, implementing a cloud asset management system by 2020 in Thailand and South Korea.
Challenges of legacy system and diverse business culture
Existing hotels will be migrated based on a case-by-case assessment with hoteliers about ROI; Many hotels are still depreciating investments in existing facilities. The on-prem approach comes at its own cost, which can cut down on moving to the cloud. “With on-prem systems, you will have to patch systems in all hotels over time, increasing overall maintenance costs and security risks,” Khang said.
“Furthermore, some hoteliers are using more and more local applications with no guarantee that it will work well over time with hardware and operating systems that comply with Accor standards, which makes it possible to Discussions sometimes get more difficult, ”he said.
“Unlike Europe, America or China – large-scale markets with pretty much homogeneity of currencies, policies, taxes and languages - all these aspects in ASEAN are diverse. This makes the application of the solution, deployment, and maintenance more complex: configuration and solutions and deployment processes must be localized for each country. ”
Moving to cloud-based hotel apps can alleviate many of the challenges, by provisioning popular hardware, operating systems, and applications hosted in the cloud.
“Deploying a new solution becomes simpler when localization – in terms of currency, tax policy, language and other solutions – is implemented for one country,” said Khang. “Then the model can be applied to all hotels without having to manage the actual setup.” That’s what happened in 2020 in Malaysia, when Accor launched a cloud-based property management application for a hotel in the country.
The legacy issues remain and are mostly addressed through an end-of-life approach on hardware and software, Khang said. “Instead of renewing the on-premises hardware at the end of the contract or the expiration date, we recommend hotels to switch to cloud solutions when there is a cloud version of the application available,” he said. “In other cases, without an alternative cloud solution, we’re working to support creating proxy services for legacy applications.”
“But we will need to look into exceptions when connectivity could be an issue; for example, resorts in remote areas. By continuing to offer on-prem solutions or by having ongoing plans to allow a hotel to operate temporarily offline. With the continued advancement in connectivity around the world and the development of 5G, this will be an issue that will gradually decrease over time.
Speed up Cloud Strategy
Currently, the Cloud strategy at Accor is taking place in phases. Various different stakeholders are involved in the process, and a lot of tweaking is made to suit the specific hotel or country IT environment. When introducing a cloud-based asset management system, a preliminary assessment is required to determine the IT environment impacts such as connectivity.
“We continuously deploy the various applications needed in a hotel until it can be 100% functional in the cloud. … There is no Big Bang approach, but a pilot approach on different hotels with an experimental and learning approach. “
Accor is also working to create a global standard “cloud hotel” service that will package both cloud and non-cloud applications and will begin rolling out in 2021. “Our ambition is 80% off server-side hardware for hotels as we increase our cloud offerings ”.
Currently, Accor is using different providers, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud for this Cloud strategy. “We are currently reinforcing our strategy to accelerate the cloud and choose when to use the right providers,” Khang said.
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