Presentation
Barceló Hotels & Resorts, the hotel division of Barceló Corporación Empresarial, is the 4th largest hotel chain in Spain and the 33rd largest in the world. It currently has 140 hotels and more than 37.000 rooms in 17 countries.
Business platform description
The development platform is “Microsoft .Net” using a SQL Server database. The B2B services (integration with providers) are based on the intensive use of Web Services.
The number of daily webservice transactions in August 2014 is approximately 700.000. To support this number of transactions they needed 5 XML servers and 4 database servers.
The challenges of this environment
- With the expansion of the B2B market, new clients are using our XML integration, meaning that the number of requests that must be processed by our servers is always increasing. We needed a tool that could handle part of this traffic, and that could also free us from having to buy new servers, as well as the licenses for the software running on both the application and database servers.
- The increase in both the amount and the complexity of transactions requires a more exhaustive analysis of the errors generated in our webservice, both our own errors as well as those errors caused by erroneous requests sent by our integrators.
- More business information about how our integrators are using our webservice was also needed.
The Solution: Ventus Proxy
- Thanks to its Web Services cache system we were able to handle 50% more request load without having to expand our infrastructure.
- We have real-time traces for errors caused by our integrators. Some examples:
- We detected errors that were not properly identifiable and discovered that the number of errors returned for no availability was less than half of what we thought it was. This gave us ideas for applying new availability policies.
- We detected that our integrators didn’t have the hotel portfolio up to date, and were offering hotels that we no longer had, and not offering hotels that had been recently added.
- We also detected incorrect data sent by our integrators, such as incorrect destination, entrance date the same as exit date, etc.
- We detected that requests were being made for dates in the past.
- We detected that our American integrators must allow availability queries for the previous day, to take into consideration the time difference.
- We detected that requests were being made for dates far in the future. A rule was designed to prevent requests that have no result from being processed.
- We get up to the minute statistics for all services that we offer to our clients.
- The control panels generated by the Ventus Proxy real-time monitorization instantly detect any problem on any server, alerting us by email or SMS.
- Thanks to the Ventus Proxy statistics we can now obtain detailed information about how our integrators are using our webservice.
- Furthermore, the implementation of the solution did not require any additional development by Barceló Hotels, and it only took 4 days to integrate it in our system.
- And for any issue or question we might have, the support offered by the Ventus Proxy team is simply outstanding.
Outcome
The Ventus Proxy cache services, monitorization and statistics have helped in the development of Barceló Hotels & Resorts’ business, and has been key for T.I. as well as for marketing and sales.
Conclusion
Ventus is one of the basic pillars used for responding to our integrations quickly and efficiently. It has been of invaluable help for monitoring and debugging our integration processes. The technical support is outstanding.
Rafael Palou, IT Manager.