In 2014, AccorHotels began its €225 million digital transformation. "We were struggling with a best-of-breed IT environment made up of many developments, all of which were integrated with strong dependencies," explains Chief Technology and Innovation Officer Eric Wyttynck. "The difficulties in bringing together Oracle and Salesforce applications illustrated the limitations of point-to-point integrations. We had to free ourselves.

"To support development of new services, and deal with the growth in transaction volumes, IT needed to deal with four issues: simplification of both our technical architecture and the ergonomics of our services; openness of our services to enable easy integration with partners; scalability to cope with load levels that can double from year to year; and modularity, enabling a truly service-oriented architecture.

AccorHotels began evaluating integration solutions, including TIBCO ActiveMatrix BusinessWorks™, TIBCO Enterprise Message Service™, and TIBCO Spotfire®. Vice President of Enterprise Architecture Erwan Vezin explains, "TIBCO was among many competitors. We chose it because of the quality of the solution, and the performance. TIBCO Professional Services supported us during implementation. They know the system, and how to use it properly, so we get maximum value."

"We were able to consult with existing customers Air France and PMU, whose feedback on TIBCO's solution was very reassuring," says Mr. Wyttynck. We have gone from an era where each new need resulted in development of a new flow, to an era where we reuse existing services. This is thanks to deployment of the platform, but also to the team who set up a new, consistent way of formulating and meeting needs. Some advice for those who deploy this type of solution: Do not underestimate the functional design of information flows. Find a company who will collaborate with you."

Improved Scalability, Performance, Customer Experience

Today, all client applications exchange information through AccorHotels' integration platform. "We have four instances in two sites in active-active mode," says Mr. Vezin. "We have 40 business services exposed and generating about 5 million messages a day, and shortly we will be adding about 40 more services around the booking domain, and increase our volume by 300%. We are using TIBCO Spotfire® to monitor the full platform to make sure everything is working properly."

"This capacity and performance, and the ability to scale to support growing traffic, already provides an improved customer experience, which will improve more over time," says Wyttynck.

Ease and Speed of Integration

"Customer data is everywhere," says Mr. Vezin. "We are keeping our silos, but removing the functional overlapping. Whenever we need data, we use TIBCO to find it in the silos and expose it as a single object that is pushed to the front application. We developed the service once, and it can be reused by everyone. Before TIBCO, it was taking months to investigate history and identify where the data was. Now, due to this service, we do the development in a few days. The main advantage is that the information is standardized. Customer data is always retrieved and integrated the same way, so, we can expose the same data on all channels without redesigning everything.

Modular Simplification

"We wanted a modular system, building blocks to execute business processes and limit the impact of new requirements," continues Mr. Vezin. "For instance, we are legally obliged to send confirmation emails to customers to verify information when changes are made to contracts. Before, we had to modify applications and then test them. Today, we do it really fast and without impacting the front-end application.

"What we have tried to do is define the way the business wants to execute their processes and structure modular business services to align to that. That way, we can answer needs and deliver processes much faster.

"We've moved some parts of the business—three silos and our big data platform—to the cloud. We are leveraging our integration capabilities to push data and get back insights. This agility also benefits many the Group’s partners."

"We have another objective, to integrate the Accor Reservation System, which now centralizes the majority of reservations. That will be another contribution, another step in the transformation of the Group," says Mr. Wyttynck.