Meeting-Space Reservation System Boosts Productivity in ...



Overview

Country: United States

Industry: Hospitality

Customer Profile

Newmarket International, creator of Delphi, helps hotels book and manage more group business than any other hospitality solution in the world, with thousands of property deployments in 65 countries.

Business Situation

Newmarket wanted to build a solution that would enable hotel properties to respond more quickly to requests for function space, because the property that responds first is more likely to win the business.

Solution

Sapient used Microsoft® Visual Studio® .NET 2003 and Microsoft to build a Web services-based application that streamlines negotiations between meeting planners and hotels.

Benefits

■ Increased productivity, responsiveness, and sales for subscribers

■ High reliability with 99.999 percent availability

■ One hundred new subscribers for Newmarket in five months

| | |“Microsoft Windows Server System and .NET application architecture have given us the infrastructure and agility to say ‘yes’ to enterprise customer needs.”

Sean O'Neill, President and CEO, Newmarket International

| |

| | | | |

| | | |Newmarket International has established a solid niche in the hospitality industry by providing a |

| | | |market-leading solution for managing function space. The company identified a need among large hotels|

| | | |to expedite the process of handling requests for meeting space and services. Newmarket called upon |

| | | |Sapient, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to help develop MeetingBroker, a hosted service that |

| | | |manages business communications between meeting planners and properties. Built upon Microsoft .NET |

| | | |technologies and running on Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software, |

| | | |MeetingBroker has proven a success in just five months. For hotel properties, the solution has |

| | | |streamlined the sales process and improved customer responsiveness. For the developer, MeetingBroker |

| | | |has paid off in increased sales—more than 100 new subscribers, with more big accounts in the works. |

| | | | |

|[pic] | | |[pic] |

| | | | |

Situation

Newmarket International, a privately held company based in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, is well known within the hospitality industry. In 1995, the company released its flagship product, Delphi, a client-server solution based on the Microsoft® Windows® operating system that manages all of the processes necessary to coordinate and sell function space at large hotels. Delphi quickly became the market leader in its category and now manages more than 140 million square feet of meeting space at over 4,000 hotel properties in 65 countries around the world.

|“We chose Sapient because of its demonstrated|

|experience in Microsoft .NET technologies, |

|its methodological strength, and its maturity|

|in delivering marketable products.” |

|Shawn McGowan, Director of On-Demand |

|Services, Newmarket International |

Newmarket saw the opportunity to build upon its strong customer base by further improving the process of reserving function space. The company was aware that the majority of the time, the first property that responds to a meeting request wins the business, so hotels would benefit from a solution to accelerate their response time. At the same time, many incoming requests, or leads, are not appropriate for a given property and do not turn into sales. Newmarket wanted to provide a way to filter out the less promising leads and zero in on the ones with the most potential so that hotels could respond to those first.

In 1999, Newmarket developed its first version of MeetingBroker, a tool to electronically transmit requests for proposals (RFPs) from professional meeting planners to properties. At that time Newmarket designed the product as an XML-based document-handling system, which enabled subscribers to submit their requests electronically within predefined parameters.

Newmarket’s consumer marketplace adopted and validated the early models of MeetingBroker, according to Shawn McGowan, Director of On-Demand Services for Newmarket International. But as Microsoft .NET technologies emerged several years later, the company saw an opportunity to significantly enhance the solution. “We could see that the next-generation services platform provided by Microsoft .NET technologies would enable us to take MeetingBroker to much higher levels of functionality with an exceptionally fast time to market,” he says. Therefore, Newmarket decided to redevelop MeetingBroker using the Microsoft .NET Framework and the Microsoft Visual Studio® .NET 2003 development system.

“We chose the Microsoft platform because it provides companies the size of Newmarket with the most full-featured solution for delivering software as a service,” adds Sean O'Neill, President and CEO of Newmarket. “This includes robust development environments, creative licensing models like the service provider licensing agreement, and enterprise tools for deployment and management of applications.”

Solution

Newmarket has a highly skilled development team, but is a lean company with a staff of 270 worldwide. To build a major new product at optimal speed, the company wanted an expert partner with ample resources. Newmarket hired Sapient, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner with a force of 2,600.

“We chose Sapient because of its demonstrated experience in Microsoft .NET technologies, its methodological strength, and its maturity in delivering marketable products,” says McGowan. “In particular, Sapient’s commitment to the Capability Maturity Model Integration software development model gave us the assurance that the process would be clean and controlled.”

Sapient planned, designed, and developed the entirely new application in just under one year. A large part of the development was performed at Sapient’s office in New Delhi, India. “Many companies experience less than stellar results with outsourcing,” comments McGowan. “Our experience with Sapient far exceeded Newmarket’s expectations.”

Architecture and Infrastructure

Together, Newmarket and Sapient redesigned MeetingBroker as a hosted application, so subscribers have no hardware or software to install. The solution is a three-tiered application with a data access layer built on a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database, a middle tier housing business objects and business rules, and a thin but robust presentation layer developed with Microsoft . Web services are used to exchange data between the application’s middle tier and external systems.

Sapient was able to save time in the development process by building the application on the .NET Framework, which Newmarket had already adopted. The developers also constructed a set of paradigms they could reuse within the application, such as a grid control and a picker tool that allows subscribers to select their preferred terminology for data fields.

One of the most important features of the application is a User Interface Toolkit. Sapient developed a set of easy-to-use controls that enable subscribers to customize the design and functionality of MeetingBroker through simple configuration changes. This way, meeting planners can submit meeting requests without ever knowing they’ve left the subscriber’s Web site.

MeetingBroker is integrated with StarCite, a leading application used by professional meeting planners worldwide, as well as with Newmarket’s Delphi. Meeting planners can transmit their RFPs directly from StarCite to all properties subscribing to MeetingBroker. Properties can pull the information directly down into Delphi to assess availability and pricing, and then send back their bid through MeetingBroker.

MeetingBroker runs on Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software housed at Newmarket’s data center. The platform consists of HP Blade Server hardware running Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003, Web Edition and Windows Server 2003, Enterprise Edition operating systems. Newmarket has set up its SQL Server 2000 database in a clustered configuration for added security of subscriber data. “Our data center processed U.S.$650 million in group business in 2004, and we are forecasting even more for 2005,” explains McGowan. “To give our subscribers absolute assurance of the security of their transactions, we needed to build redundancy and scalability into every aspect of our hosting system.”

To further safeguard subscriber data, Newmarket also developed a custom data services adaptor within Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Reporting Services that directs all data transactions through the application’s business tier, ensuring that its multitenant data tier is never violated and that one subscriber’s data can never be exposed to another’s. Finally, Newmarket deployed Microsoft Operations Manager 2000 to monitor its system performance and security and detect potential problems before they occur.

How It Works

■ Professional meeting planners can transmit their RFPs directly from StarCite. MeetingBroker receives the RFPs and distributes them to the selected properties.

■ Customers seeking meeting space can also go to a property’s Web site or a variety of public portals to access a MeetingBroker request form.

■ Subscribing properties set up rules for filtering and assigning incoming leads. When each request comes in, MeetingBroker runs it through the rules engine to determine the most appropriate property agent to send the request to.

■ MeetingBroker monitors the property’s response time to each request. If it detects no response within the time allowance set by the property, it escalates the request to the next designated agent.

■ MeetingBroker tracks and reports the lifecycle of all meeting requests so that management can assess performance and determine where problems occur.

Benefits

Newmarket launched MeetingBroker 3.0 in January 2005, released version 3.1 three months later, and is about to issue version 3.2. In less than half a year, the application has already proven of significant benefit both to subscribers and to Newmarket.

Benefits to Subscribers

■ Increased productivity. MeetingBroker streamlines the sales process for properties by consolidating incoming meeting requests from an unlimited number of sources into a single, common user environment. Properties can respond to requests consistently, regardless of the channel of origin. In addition, because MeetingBroker automatically filters the incoming requests, it helps to ensure that the subscribers’ top sellers are not wasting their time on junk leads but rather focusing on the most valued pieces of business.

■ Improved customer responsiveness. MeetingBroker has significantly sped the process of responding to meeting requests, giving Newmarket subscribers a better chance of winning the business. The application filters and assigns incoming RFPs within seconds, prevents any request from sitting unanswered, and enables quicker, more secure communications by transmitting information directly from application to application rather than by paper, phone, or fax.

■ Ease of maintenance. Because MeetingBroker is a hosted solution, it frees subscribers from having to install or manage equipment.

■ Customizability. MeetingBroker enables subscribers to fully incorporate their branding into the solution through easy-to-use controls. And, the service helps properties to continually refine their assignment and escalation rules over time so they can respond to more valuable business quicker.

■ Constant availability. Newmarket has been able to ensure subscribers all over the world of an exceptionally reliable solution, with its data center recording 99.999 percent availability over the last 12 months. “Some of our subscribers challenged whether a Microsoft platform could provide the uptime we needed for an on-demand solution,” says McGowan. “But we don’t see anyone questioning it anymore. With several years of stellar operating results, we have proven that our Windows Server System infrastructure is as stable as they come.”

■ Increased sales. All of these benefits can lead to a substantial boost in group sales. "Using Newmarket’s MeetingBroker, we're receiving 25 percent more leads,” says Nelson Garrido, Director of Global Technology for Dolce International, a MeetingBroker subscriber. “Not only are we garnering a bigger piece of the online bookings business, but the market itself is expanding exponentially across the globe—a trend that will only multiply the return on investment we are already reaping."

Benefits to Newmarket

■ Accelerated time to market. Newmarket reports that using Microsoft .NET technologies sped its product development cycle dramatically. “By leveraging a common approach to building business objects with .NET technology, we have reused our base component functionality at such a high level that we’ve been able to release new versions with major functionality improvements on a quarterly basis,” says McGowan. “Over the last 12 months, we’ve consistently hit our release schedules with high degrees of quality. We couldn’t move any faster than we have on the Microsoft .NET development platform.”

■ Ease of integration. The company also reports that building MeetingBroker with .NET technology has made the application significantly easier to integrate with other systems. “Moving away from a document-based model to a Web services model benefited all of our integration partners by making it easier for them to connect to our services,” says McGowan. “As a result, this has lowered our cost of integrating new partners.”

■ Increased sales. Given this speedy development process, Newmarket was first to market with a solution in this category and is reaping the rewards with strong early sales. “We are seeing tremendous subscriber growth due to the increased functionality we’ve built into our service,” comments O’Neill. “This year alone, we’ve added 100 new subscribers whose Web sites will be driven by MeetingBroker. And we are also seeing much bigger deals in the works, because Microsoft Windows Server System and .NET application architecture have given us the infrastructure and agility to say ‘yes’ to enterprise customer needs.”

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET

The Microsoft .NET Framework is an integral Windows component for building and running the next generation of applications and XML-based Web services. For more information about the .NET Framework go to:

framework

Microsoft Visual Studio .NET is the rapid application development (RAD) tool for building next-generation Web applications and XML-based Web services. Visual Studio .NET empowers developers to rapidly design broad-reach Web applications for any device and any platform. In addition, Visual Studio .NET is fully integrated with the Microsoft .NET Framework, providing support for multiple programming languages and automatically handling many common programming tasks, freeing developers to rapidly create Web applications using their language of choice. For more information about Visual Studio .NET go to:

msdn.vstudio

Acquire Visual Studio .NET:

msdn.vstudio/howtobuy

MSDN® Subscriptions:

msdn.subscriptions

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| |Software and Services

■ Products

− Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2003

− Microsoft Operations Manager 2003

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition |Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Web Edition

■ Technologies

− Web Services

− Microsoft

Hardware

■ HP Blade Servers

■ HP Storage Area Network | |

"Using Newmarket’s MeetingBroker, we're receiving 25 percent more leads. Not only are we garnering a bigger piece of the online bookings business, but the market itself is expanding exponentially across the globe--a trend that will only multiply the return on investment we are already reaping.”

Nelson Garrido, Director of Global Technology, Dolce International

| |

© 2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, MSDN, Visual Studio, Windows, the Windows logo, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published June 2005 | | |

For More Information

For more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234 in the United States or (905) 568-9641 in Canada. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:

For more information about Sapient products and services, call (617) 621-0200 or visit the Web site at:

For more information about Newmarket International products and services, call (888) 829-8871 or visit the Web site at:

“Our data center processed U.S.$650 million in group business in 2004, and we are forecasting even more for 2005. To give our subscribers absolute assurance of the security of their transactions, we needed to build redundancy and scalability into every aspect of our hosting system.”

Shawn McGowan, Director of On-Demand Services, Newmarket International

| |

“We chose the Microsoft platform because it provides companies the size of Newmarket with the most full-featured solution for delivering software as a service.”

Sean O'Neill, President and CEO, Newmarket International

| |

“Over the last 12 months, we’ve consistently hit our release schedules with high degrees of quality. We couldn’t move any faster than we have on the Microsoft .NET development platform.”

Shawn McGowan, Director of On-Demand Services, Newmarket International

| |

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