Mandarin Oriental Deploys 22 Riverbed Steelhead Appliances

Riverbed Technology announced the deployment of 22 Riverbed Steelhead appliances at Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group‘s hotels and offices worldwide.

As a result of its Riverbed WAN optimization deployment, Mandarin Oriental has dramatically accelerated its corporate Intranet site and customer relationship management (CRM) system, resulting in reduced business costs and improved customer satisfaction.

Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group is an international hotel investment and management group with deluxe and first class hotels, resorts and residences in sought-after destinations around the world. The Group now operates, or has under development, 41 hotels representing over 10,000 rooms in 25 countries, with 17 hotels in Asia, 14 in the Americas, and 10 in Europe and North Africa.

Mandarin Oriental is a global company with a corporate philosophy that encourages its hotels around the world to operate fairly independently and embrace local culture, imbuing each with a unique sense of place. The Group is committed to providing a truly legendary quality experience to its guests. Its properties vary widely, from boutique hotels with fewer than 80 rooms, to tropical resorts spread out over 50 acres and city-center business hotels in the world’s financial capitals. So while the Group does have global IT standards, the implementation is often customized to fit local requirements.

About a year ago Mandarin Oriental added a new central database component to its CRM system and upgraded its corporate Intranet site. According to Raju Daryanani, Vice President of IT Infrastructure and Information Security at Mandarin Oriental, "The CRM system is at the heart of any hotel’s IT operation, as many customer interactions – in particular hotel booking – are processed by it. It is absolutely critical for this application to be fast, as every customer interaction involves multiple system transactions. Additionally, sharing key information via our corporate Intranet site between our properties worldwide is a crucial element to successful hotel operation and helps us to extend our guest-oriented corporate culture to staff at our newer properties."

Since Mandarin Oriental’s central CRM system database and corporate Intranet site are hosted in a centralized data center, the company faced the typical challenges associated with geographically dispersed locations needing to access critical information quickly. Mandarin Oriental’s IT group realized that WAN optimization technology was the best solution for its requirements.

"A thorough review of the leading vendors’ products led us to the conclusion that Riverbed best met our overall needs. Production network testing showed that access to our new corporate Intranet site was significantly faster and that we could almost double the performance of the new CRM system database. This directly translates to a lower cost of business operations for our company, as well as improved customer satisfaction," said Daryanani.

Daryanani and his IT team purchased the Riverbed Steelhead appliances centrally in Hong Kong, but had them delivered direct to each hotel, along with a simple instruction document explaining to the local IT team how to connect them into the production network. All device configurations were performed remotely by the Hong Kong-based IT group. "The fact that we were able to install these devices quickly and easily across multiple disparate IT environments without disrupting the production network saved us a great deal of time and money," Daryanani said.