MAY 9, 2008. Microsoft Certified Partner Multi-Systems, Inc. (MSI) provides the hospitality industry with a range of integrated technology solutions, including sales, marketing, and catering systems; centralized corporate services; and wireless check-in and check-out services. MSI sought to build on the success of EnterprisePM, its property management system for hoteliers with multiple properties or brands. The company wanted to increase the scalability of the product in response to demand from customers.

“EnterprisePM has been well received by our diverse customer base, but the growing and dynamic needs of larger hotels and resorts were taxing the upper limits of MSI’s performance standards for the product,” says David Kantrud, Senior Vice President of Development for MSI. “Changes were needed to deliver the fullest range of EnterprisePM’s capabilities for our customers, and choosing the best architecture to meet our scalability and performance demands was a critical decision for us. We wanted to ensure we would satisfy our own calculations and expectations for EnterprisePM performance as well as fulfill customer expectations.”

MSI also was working to offer a centrally hosted version of EnterprisePM, but it needed to get a sense of the hardware requirements for such a model. As the company began to explore these and other issues, MSI approached Microsoft."We wanted to know which hardware configurations would give us the best performance,” says Kantrud. “And we also needed to identify our hardware costs so that we could appropriately price the product.”

Solution
Microsoft suggested an engagement at a Microsoft Technology Center (MTC). “I was extremely enthusiastic at the opportunity to confer with people who had such a deep understanding of the technologies that make our product run,” says Kantrud.

MSI visited the MTC in Irvine, California, in November 2007 for a one-day Architecture Design Session (ADS). The three-member MSI team had an initial conversation with the MTC architects about the hospitality industry and its EnterprisePM application. MSI team members sketched out their architecture plans for the upgraded and hosted versions of the product, and the MTC architects introduced suggestions for improvements based on industry best practices. “The MTC architects validated our solution architecture and also suggested ways to optimize it,” says Kantrud. For instance, the architects recommended that MSI implement Web services to enhance performance and discussed the best way to share server-computer resources among separate customers to maximize server utilization. They also helped MSI understand the value of moving from the Microsoft SQL Server® 2005 database software to SQL Server 2008 to improve its scale.

In January 2008, MSI returned to the Irvine MTC for a Proof-of-Concept Workshop that involved ideas from the ADS. The five-member MSI team included employees from the company’s development staff, quality-assurance team, and support staff. “We wanted the people responsible for creating, testing, and supporting our new hosted solution to see it in action,” says Kantrud.

MSI worked with MTC architects to benchmark the solution’s performance as it supported the simulated daily operations and peak conditions of a typical large hotel chain. The team conducted stress tests on a variety of hardware makes, models, and configurations to see which combination best met its needs. MSI found that with the changes it had made to EnterprisePM, scalability was even better than it had hoped, and it released EnterprisePM for production in February 2008.

Benefits
MSI used its MTC engagements to improve the scalability of its product and increase its testing knowledge, thus providing applications that better support the needs of the hospitality industry. “We invest so much in our products, so we want to ensure that they’re the best that they can be,” says Kantrud. “Our MTC engagements helped us not only make smart product-related decisions now but also improve the way we’ll tackle other projects in the future.”

More scalable solution. As a result of the time spent at the MTC, MSI improved the scalability of its application and now can show potential customers real metrics to support its scalability claims. “We studied the impact of a new processor and found that it helped us effectively double the number of users that EnterprisePM could support, without compromising performance,” says Kantrud. “Previously, we had to extrapolate our scalability limits from the results of small tests, but now we know exactly how much our product can handle.”

Access to resources. MSI benefitted from its MTC experience because it gained access to a greater set of hardware resources. “Working at the MTC gave us a tremendous opportunity to test multiple scenarios under a variety of conditions and configurations,” says Kantrud. “By validating our capabilities using the MTC’s vast resources and wide array of hardware, we can offer our customers more platform choices and better help them select the most cost-effective, proven option for their property.”

Improved technical knowledge. One of the most helpful elements of the engagements for MSI was learning more about load testing. “As a result of working with the benchmarking tools at the MTC, we realized there is a ‘bell curve’ distribution of acceptable and usable performance,” explains Kantrud. “Typically this means there is a point prior to complete failure where the product is still operating, but performance degrades substantially and is unacceptable to us and our customers. This knowledge allowed us to establish more exacting standards for true scalability rather than raw functionality.”

Stronger partner relationship. Although many MSI competitors use non-Microsoft technologies for their systems, MSI feels as though the MTC experience reaffirmed the value of working with Microsoft and its products. “We saw that Microsoft technologies are just as scalable as those from other vendors, and we experienced firsthand the high level of investment that Microsoft makes as a company in the success of its partners,” says Kantrud.