IBM Touts UC Victory at Hyatt

Published: October 28, 2008

by Alex Woodie

A new Unified Communication (UC) software implementation at Global Hyatt is expected to yield greater collaboration among the hotel conglomerate's 25,000 employees around the world, IBM announced last week. The implementation will include Lotus Notes, Domino, and Sametime products, and provides the Hyatt chain with e-mail, instant messaging, Web conferencing, document sharing, and calendaring capabilities.

With "the desktop of the future" as its goal, Global Hyatt set out to create a technological path that would get it there. The company settled on a platform of IBM products, headlined by Lotus Notes version 8, which is being rolled out to Hyatt's North American hotels this year and its international hotels next year.

Cliff Tamplin, Global Hyatt's vice president of IT, infrastructure, and operations, explains the goal. "We need to enable our associates to be more collaborative and versatile with open tools that have the best return on investment. This is why we chose IBM's collaboration software," he says, adding "it is easier and faster to share documents and schedule meetings using the on-line tools from IBM."

In the future, the company expects to create composite applications that combine data from multiple sources, and to benefit from Lotus Notes' so-called "live text" capability.

Live Text, according to IBM, enables Notes to "recognize patterns in text in any document and then perform actions on that text." Examples of live text include mapping an address, looking up a name in your corporate directory, checking stock, looking up a part number, checking a flight status, and tracking a package, IBM says.

Global Hyatt is running Lotus Notes on servers from Sun Microsystems. The company runs 10 servers at each of two geographically separated data centers that run in a nonstop high availability cluster, thus guaranteeing that Hyatt will have e-mail service at all times, according to Tamplin "This is important because of the business critical nature of e-mail. Our e-mail service not only runs internal operations, but also is an integral part of our customer facing support and sales processes," he adds.

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