The choice behind hotel CIO Brian Kirkland’s all-in bet on cloud
Mere months after becoming chief information officer at Choice Hotels International, Brian Kirkland embarked on one of the most consequential projects that a CIO can undertake: getting out of the business of running data centers.
Beginning in January 2019, Kirkland steered Choice Hotels through a five-year project that decommissioned more than 3,700 servers, retired 331 outdated software programs, and refreshed 250 applications, fully migrating the hotel chain’s entire system infrastructure to the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
“There’s a lot of tech out there that’s tech debt, and a lot of tech that hasn’t been invested in,” says Kirkland, who oversees Choice’s overall IT strategy. “We took up the strategy of, let’s modernize as much as we can as we move to the cloud, so we actually get the benefit of the cloud. And then let’s lift and shift the rest.”
Many hotel chains operate on outdated, decades-old central reservation systems to manage rates, room availability, inventory, and back-office tasks. “Choice was undertaking an endeavor to replace that and purpose build it in the cloud,” Kirkland says. After the 2018 launch of a cloud-based reservation system, ChoiceEdge, the company wanted to do more.
Alongside AWS, Kirkland worked closely with Choice’s chief financial officer and the finance team to forecast what spending would look like for the multiyear project, as well as predict growth at Choice, historical pricing trends at AWS, and factor in some contingency what-ifs. Kirkland also spent time with other business leaders, including at Capital One, who was halfway through their cloud project.
“A lot of times, people lose sight of what their spend is, and they don’t react until it’s too late,” says Kirkland. Choice put governance and guardrails in place around costs and paid close attention to consumption. A tagging method was deployed to keep track of apps that had servers that were spun up but weren’t in use, or servers that were oversized and could be downgraded to save money.
Choice’s deepening partnership with AWS has also allowed the hotel operator to opt in on future technology advancements. “They change their technology all the time, they are releasing new products all the time,” says Kirkland. “Things I can never try to keep up with if I was trying to do it myself.”
AWS also helped train 500 Choice employees to get them up to speed for the migration to the cloud.
“A lot of those roles that weren’t cloud enabled before, they needed to learn new tech,” says Kirkland.
The company is a pilot customer of Amazon Connect, using AI technology to more clearly identify customers, create personas with that information, and offer them a more personalized guest experience.
And in 2021, the company debuted ChoiceMax, a mobile-enabled revenue management system that uses the cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to offer rate recommendations. It looks at competitive pricing and other factors—such as a major local sporting event or a Taylor Swift concert—and then makes a rate recommendation, helping maximize the profitability of franchisees' properties. ChoiceMax is a tech upgrade that Kirkland says wouldn't be possible without the cloud.
“The reality is data is the source of enabling value in the future,” says Kirkland. “And so how do you bring that data, tie it into your systems, and leverage it is the magic and that's where a lot of focus is, on trying to make sure that we're delivering the best value we can tomorrow.”
John Kell
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
