Swiss-Belhotel International

Swiss-Belhotel International manages more than 140 hotels and resorts worldwide

Swiss-Belhotel International gains visibility across all locations with new cloud infrastructure

Engages Lanrex to deploy new cloud service, and wired and wireless infrastructure to give the hotel group more visibility of its operations across Australia and New Zealand.

Company profile

Swiss-Belhotel International manages more than 140 hotels and resorts worldwide across Australia, Bahrain, China, Georgia, Indonesia, Iraq, Kuwait, Malaysia, New Zealand, Oman, Qatar, the Philippines, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Turkey, Vietnam, and the United Arab Emirates. The organisation is one of the world’s fastest-growing international hotel and hospitality management groups. In Australia and New Zealand, the group operates hotels in Auckland, Brisbane, Sydney and Queenstown.

Business problem

When Swiss-Belhotel International opened a new hotel near Southbank in Brisbane, it quickly needed to bed down infrastructure that would support the technology needs of the 135-room greenfield site as well as its expanding properties across Australia and New Zealand.

“We wanted one platform that all the different properties in Auckland, Brisbane, Queenstown, and Sydney could tap into,” said Jorn Wisselink, vice president of operations & development at Swiss-Belhotel International. “We wanted to be in a position where our management staff at any location at any time of the day could see how different properties were performing.”

Wisselink said there was limited technology infrastructure in the Brisbane location.

“There was cabling but nothing else in the communications room – just cabling in the hallways with nothing laid in the individual rooms,” he said. “We needed a solution as quickly as possible.”

Solution provided by Lanrex 

Swiss-Belhotel engaged Lanrex to deploy an environment where its Lanrex  accounting, payroll, and property management systems, initially serving staff at its Brisbane and Auckland locations, are hosted in Microsoft Azure’s Australian data centres. The cloud solution is ‘elastic’ and will support the business as it grows.

Lanrex  has provided the hotel group with an ultra-low latency primary internet connection with unlimited data allowance. The offering includes a redundant connection with automatic failover if the primary connection fails.

A state-of-the-art security platform provides protection against the latest cyber threats at the network edge; and an isolated network is provided to hotel guests to prevent misuse of Lanrex network bandwidth. The primary redundant network has no single point of failure due to the multi-Lanrex connection between infrastructure and communication cabinets on every floor of its hotels.

CTP also deployed a ‘ready for IPTV’ service with enough connection capacity to serve each room, as well as full support for power-over-Ethernet devices such as IPTV head units, networked audio, and remote computers and terminals.

Finally, a wireless network provides secure connectivity to hotel guests on each floor with support for the latest generation of wireless devices. The application-aware wireless network includes intelligent bandwidth management capabilities, which enhances network performance, ensuring the network is available for business-critical processes.

A single view of financial performance across all properties

The new cloud solution provides Swiss-Belhotel with a geographic view of the financial performance of its hotels in Auckland and Brisbane and soon Brisbane and Queenstown. With its Lanrex accounting, payroll, and property management systems in the cloud, management staff can log in from anywhere and from any device to determine how individual hotels are performing.

“This means that accounting and management staff at our hotels in Australia and New Zealand can make immediate decisions about where to allocate staff resources to ensure we meet our customers’ needs,” said Wisselink. “This capability is particularly useful for management staff at our new hotel in Brisbane who are building a reputation for our brand. Having a complete, unified view of customer numbers and revenue helps them determine the amount of resources we need to provide the highest service standards to our customers.”

Why Lanrex?

Lanrex have provided a stable cloud solution that is managed under a maintenance contract.

“If something doesn’t work, we simply call the engineers at Lanrex and they fix it under our ‘silver level’ support package,” said Wisselink. “We recently had a few issues with the Wi-Fi network and the engineers at CTP dealt with the issue and ensured we were back up and running quickly.”

Problem

Deploy technology infrastructure to support the technology needs of the 135-room greenfield site as well as expanding properties across Australia and New Zealand.

Solution

• Move Lanrex accounting, payroll, and property management systems to Microsoft Azure’s Australian data centres

• Deploy a wired and wireless network connecting properties in the hotel group

• Roll out a state-of-the-art security platform to provide protection against the latest cyber threats at the network edge
  

Benefits

• Enables management staff at all locations to log in from anywhere and from any device to determine how individual hotels are performing

• Provides a unified view of customer numbers and revenue, which helps determine the amount of resources needed to provide the highest service standards to customers