Partner Profile: Micros-Fidelio Software GmbH & Co Kg

When you arrive at a hotel anywhere in the world, the chances are that the receptionist will check you in using Micros-Fidelio software.

Formed from the merger of US-based Micros and Germany-based Fidelio in 1995, Micros-Fidelio is the world's leading provider of software and systems to the hospitality industry. It realises an annual revenue of €400m from sales to restaurants, hotel and shops around the world.

Consistently profitable, it is three times the size of its next nearest competitor, and counts such names as Starwood, Hilton, Marriott, TGI Friday's, Radisson, Hard Rock Caf頡nd Whitbread among its prestigious clientele.

The European development hub of the company's hotel systems business - the Fidelio side of the company - is in Hamburg, Germany. Development work is done here on one of the company's hotel management software suites, and the company has also built a state-of-the-art data centre to host its applications on its customers' behalf.

According to Peter Stenz, senior vice president of strategic initiatives for Micros-Fidelio's Europe, Africa and Middle East (EAME) region, much of the company's success is due to its ability to cater to every sector of the market. "Our customers include every single type of hotel," he says. "Anywhere that provides a bed, we have a system to run it."

The demands of a large international chain of luxury hotels are very different from those of a small, private guesthouse, so the Micros-Fidelio hotel management software suite is of necessity very broad. The latest version of the suite, OPERA, includes modules spanning the entire gamut of hospitality management needs, from check-in and check-out, engineering and catering, to spa management, gaming interfaces and golf management.

The suite of applications may be diverse, but underpinning them is a common foundation - Oracle9i Database and Oracle9i Application Server. Micros-Fidelio's relationship with Oracle is a long-standing one. "We first started working with Oracle eleven years ago, when the database was on version 6," he says. "When we came to build the OPERA suite we evaluated other database platforms, but Oracle was clearly the best option."

One of the key reasons why Micros-Fidelio uses Oracle is the sheer scalability of the database. "Some of our customers are small, 20-room hotels, and at the other end you have the large international chains," says Stenz. "We need to provide a technology base that can accommodate all sizes of customer."

Smaller customers lack the budget and the technical skills of their larger counterparts though, so Micros-Fidelio had to make its Oracle-based solutions as simple and affordable as possible. It has done this by adopting Oracle's embedded software licence model. Instead of selling the Oracle part of its solution as a separate, licensed product, Micros-Fidelio has embedded the Oracle layers into its own software and licenses the whole stack as one single product. Oracle receives a percentage of the licence revenue for each sale, and Micros-Fidelio provides support services for the Oracle elements of the solution as well as its own.

"You don't want a mission-critical system like ours to go down, and Oracle is the most stable database in the world."
- Peter Stenz, Senior Vice-President, Strategic Initiatives, Micros-Fidelio EAME

As well as making the solution affordable for smaller customers, Oracle also provides a crucial level of stability. "Our smaller customers don't have a lot of in-house technical savvy, so the solution needs to be as simple and as robust as possible," says Stenz.

"With the Oracle software embedded in ours, they don't need to have any Oracle knowledge of their own - in fact many don't even know that the Oracle layer is there. At the same time, they benefit from Oracle's high reliability - you don't want a mission-critical system like ours to go down, and Oracle is the most stable database in the world."

Micros-Fidelio has used the efficiencies inherent in Oracle's software architecture to make its systems more cost-effective for larger customers too - a necessity in the economic downturn caused by the after-effects of the September 11th attacks. Oracle's Real Application Clusters (RAC) technology enables customers to invest incrementally in hardware as their needs increase; rather than having to buy large server capacity to meet projected future demand.

"The clustering option is proving very attractive to customers," says Stenz. "Customers that have many sites in close proximity are using the clustering features of Oracle to create local data centres serving multiple properties, as the Windsor Hotel Group has done for its hotels across Rio de Janeiro. It makes sense because it saves a lot of hardware and administration costs."

Micros-Fidelio is currently evaluating the benefits of the latest version of Oracle's software infrastructure, version 10g. "We are quite a conservative company, and we don't move to new technologies without careful evaluation," says Stenz. "However, we are certainly looking at 10g and we are already impressed by some of the new features."

Serendipitously, Micros-Fidelio's German offices are not too far from the Oracle-HP competency centre in B�blingen, which means the company has ready access to a comprehensive testing environment for Oracle-based solutions. Later this year the company plans to use the HP centre to test the performance and scalability of its software with Oracle9i RAC on HP Itanium boxes, before offering the combination to the market.

Micros-Fidelio enjoys a positive working partnership with Oracle, according to Stenz. "The relationship works very well. Oracle are always quick to provide the resources we need, and our Channel Manager in Germany, Tim Schuette, is very helpful and supportive," he says.

"Vendors selling into the SME end of the market should definitely investigate the Oracle Embedded Licence option."

"Even if you're only doing deals of €4,000 a time, it's still viable to base your solution on Oracle because they just take a percentage of your license fee. It's great for the customer because they get the world's best database, and it means you only need to work with one infrastructure vendor no matter what size of solution you are selling."

More information about Micros-Fidelio is available at www.micros.com