Radisson books into a single datacentre

Radisson Edwardian is spending more than £1m upgrading its network, and is ditching PCs in favour of a central portal accessed by thin-client terminals.

The hotel chain's Next Generation Infrastructure project will cut expansion costs and turn the company's head office at Heathrow into a private application service provider.

Servers at 10 London hotels will be scrapped in favour of a single datacentre and storage farm at Heathrow.

A Mediapps portal will provide a single entry point to all applications including financials, human resources, office tools and training facilities.

The company will see the real benefit when the infrastructure is rolled out to new hotels planned for Manchester, Birmingham and London, says the chain's IT director, Iype Abraham.

"Any future hotel developments, in or out of London, will use the same infrastructure so will cost no more to manage," he said.

"To set up a new hotel we just have to buy the computers, hook into the private network and put a browser on the desktop. We'll have everything there from day one without needing to do any specific investments from the hotel."

Ease of administration will also save money, because upgrades and software delivery to the 400 desktops can be done centrally.

"The ease and reduced cost of administration are fundamental - we will have no IT staff in the hotels at all because it can all be managed from head office," said Abraham.

Using a portal will reduce time wastage by tailoring information to specific staff and filtering out the irrelevancies.

"The portal will revolutionise the way we work because it can target content to people who really need it, and we can monitor the real level of usage and improve the service," said Abraham.

Design on the project began in January. The portal is currently in development and is due for completion at the end of August.