Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the HP Discover conference on how InterContinental Hotels Group has reduced time and cost in app development.

1. Discover Case Study: How IHG Has Deployed and Benefited
from Increased App Testing
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the HP Discover conference on how
InterContinental Hotels Group has reduced time and cost in app development.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: HP
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
from the HP Discover 2011 conference in Las Vegas.
We're here on the Discover show-floor, the week of June 6, to explore some
major Enterprise IT solutions, trends, and innovations making news across
HP’s eco-system of customers, partners, and developers.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your
host throughout this series of HP-sponsored Discover live discussions.
[Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Our next use case study focuses on InterContinental Hotels Group. We're going to be looking at
what they are doing around automation and unification of applications, development and
deployment, specifically looking at software as a service (SaaS) as a benefit, and how unification
helps bring together performance, but also reduce complexity costs over time.
To help guide us through this discussion, we're here with Brooks Solomon. He is the Manager of
Test Automation at InterContinental. Welcome to BriefingsDirect.
Brooks Solomon: Thank you, Dana. Pleasure to be here.
Gardner: As I understand it, you're going to be delivering your presentation here at Discover.
I'm curious about what the gist is. What’s your high-level takeaways?
Solomon: We use HP’s testing software all the way from Quality Center (QC), through Quick
Test Professional (QTP), through LoadRunner, up into the Business Availability Center (BAC)
tool. I'm going to talk about how we get to the process of BAC and then how BAC benefits us
from a global perspective.
Gardner: Give me a little sense of the scope and size of your operations?
Solomon: InterContinental Hotels Group is the largest hotel company by number of rooms. We
have 645,000 rooms, 4,400 hotels, with seven different brands, and the largest and first hotel
loyalty program with 58 million members. The majority of the hotels, 3,500 or so, are in the US
and the others are distributed around the world. We're going to be expanding to China more and
more over the next few years.

2. Gardner: How about in terms of numbers of applications and scope and size of your IT
operations?
Solomon: I couldn’t list the number of applications we have. The majority of the revenue comes
from four major applications that are consumer-facing.
Gardner: Let’s get into that a little bit. Obviously, reservations, rewards, customer-facing web,
and self-service type of functionality are super-important to you. Give us a sense of what you're
doing with those sorts of apps and how critical they really are for you?
Solomon: The apps that we generate support the majority of IHG’s revenue and, if they're not
customer-facing, they're a call-center application. If you call 1800 Holiday Inn, that
kind of thing, you'll get a reservation agent somewhere around the world wherever
you are. Then, that agent will actually tap into another application that we
developed to generate the reservation from there.
Gardner: A lot of test and development organizations have been early adopters of
SaaS and cloud functionality. What’s the breakdown with your use of products? Do
you have an on-premise portion or percentage in SaaS? How does that break down
for you?
SaaS monitors
Solomon: We use SaaS and we have a private use of SaaS. Going back to our call-center
applications, there are local centers around the world, and we've installed SaaS monitors at those
facilities. Not only do we get a sense of how the agent’s response time and availability is from
their centers, we also get a full global view from customers and how their experience is,
wherever they maybe.
Gardner: In terms of your developers, your testing, and your application life-cycle to what
degree are the tools that you're using SaaS-based?
Solomon: Right now the only SaaS-based tool we have is the BAC. The other HP tools that we
use are in-house.
Gardner: When you move towards lifecycle benefits, do you have any sense of what that’s done
for you, either at a cost and efficiency level within IT, or most importantly, at the customer level
in terms of satisfaction and trust?
Solomon: Without the automated suite of tools that we have, we couldn’t deliver our products in
a timely fashion and with quality. We have an aggressive release schedule every two weeks,
distributing new products, new applications, or bug fixes for things that have occurred. Without
the automated regression suite of tools that we have, we couldn’t get those out in time. Having
those tools in place allows us approximately a 75 percent reduction in cost.

3. Gardner: Having gone through this process, to move into that level of efficiency, do you have
any 20/20 hindsight things that you may have done differently with that knowledge or that you
might pass along as advice to our listeners?
Solomon: I would say just to define the core functionality of your applications
and automate those first. Then, once new enhancements come along and there are
business-critical type transactions, I would include those in your automated suite
of tools and tests.
Gardner: How about your thoughts for the future? Do you have any purchases or acquisitions or
tools you're looking to adopt in the future? Do you have a roadmap?
Solomon: We're coming off of a mainframe reservation system and we are converting that into
service oriented architecture (SOA). So, we’ve recently purchased HP service tests. We hope that
acquisition would help us automate all of our services coming off the mainframe. We're going to
do that on a gradual basis. So, we're going to be automating those as they come online.
Gardner: Very good. We've been talking about application lifecycle management and
productivity. Our guest has been Brooks Solomon. He is the Manager of Test Automation at
InterContinental Hotels Group, and I believe you are based in Atlanta, is that right?
Solomon: That’s correct. Our America’s office is at Atlanta.
Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to
you from the HP Discover 2011 Conference in Las Vegas.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of user
experience discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it oniTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Sponsor: HP
Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the HP Discover conference on how
InterContinental Hotel Group has reduced time and cost in app development. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.
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