Success Outpacing Growth

With a key SaaS platform for the hospitality industry, Knowland provides customers with historical contact data, group booking patterns, and market benchmarking. It had the right business strategy and was positioned for growth—but its platform success was outpacing internal processes. As the company grew, it had developed several home-brew applications for processes from sales to content management.

"Although our applications were doing well in the marketplace, our internal business processes were not caught up," said Steve Titus, chief technology officer. "Legacy internal applications were siloed, prohibiting us from internally sharing data."

Since Knowland used Salesforce.com, it needed a connector that would enable sharing data between Salesforce and its internal applications.

The company wanted a partner that could help capture and optimize its workflows, including the Salesforce connection. It turned to Orion Global Solutions, a cloud advisory organization that focuses on Salesforce implementations, who recommended TIBCO Cloud™ Integration.

The TIBCO Cloud Integration graphical interface allowed Knowland to create custom low-code connectors that it used to connect pieces of its infrastructure.

"TIBCO Cloud Integration is phenomenal for us because we can create and craft more creative solutions for our customers, and connect them all together so they can touch their customers," said Yacov Wrocherinsky, president and CEO of Orion Global Solutions.

"Orion really took the time to understand our processes and were a partner that immediately helped us effectively get them implemented in Salesforce," said Titus.

Detailed and Synchronized Data Supporting Business

With TIBCO Cloud Integration, Knowland is able to maintain data on 200,000 hotels worldwide, synchronizing data with Salesforce daily. This includes getting down-to-the-minute details, including the layouts and amenities of all rooms in a hotel, both guest rooms and conference rooms.

"We can share account level information down to the very small details," said Titus.

Better Customer Experiences

For Knowland, the ability for TIBCO Cloud Integration to flexibly support its API has been a real advantage. The solution gives Knowland the ability to have a decoupled, code-free environment while updating data as often as needed, something not all integration platforms provide. As a result, hospitality customers, such as hotels and convention center operators, can provide more efficient services and overall better customer experiences to their patrons.

"We have dashboard visualizations that show the state of the integration and the state of the data. These could really be useful for our data operations group, who are not highly technical. They can monitor, troubleshoot, and extend the platform," said Titus.

Developer Time Savings and Greater Business Value

Titus's developers spent 15 percent of their time each month dealing with data integration challenges. With TIBCO Cloud Integration, integration time was reduced to close to zero. Now, instead of a whole team spending time each month solving integration challenges, the responsibility is delegated to one person, allowing the other developers to use their time to work on projects that bring more value to the business.

"Ten to fifteen percent of my development team's capacity is now freed up to help us reach milestones, implement features, and get to the goal of building a better product for our end customers a lot faster," said Titus.

Knowland wants to integrate all of its systems and expose APIs and data analysis capabilities. "We want to become a company that supplies data as the product," said Titus. "We will leverage TIBCO Cloud Integration to do that in a very scalable, robust, code-free way."