Arup Nanda, Director of Database Engineering and Operations

Kara Cummings

Starwood is one of the world's largest hotel and leisure companies. The hotel and leisure business is conducted both directly and through their subsidiaries. Their brand names include St. Regis: The Luxury Collection, Sheraton, Westin: W and Four Points by Sheraton. Through these brands, they are well represented in most major markets around the world.

Starwood's upgrade to an Oracle Database 10g environment from a single-instance of Oracle9i Database is a part of their on-going migration of their core applications to an open computing platform from a mainframe environment. The company is expecting to complete its three-year mainframe migration project by end of 2006. Starwood needed a highly available and reliable information technology (IT) system to replace its mainframe-based system. In order to capture, confirm and track the thousands of daily online and phone reservations as well as support the 22 million members of its Starwood Preferred Guest® loyalty program, Starwood relies on Oracle Database 10g, Oracle Real Application Clusters and Oracle Enterprise Manager 10g Grid Control (Oracle Grid Control) running on a two-node HP-UX cluster. The company also migrated to Oracle Grid Control to manage and monitor the performance of its clustered database and applications replacing a third-party database management tool. Starwood operates a 12-terabyte Oracle-based data warehouse for capturing and analyzing its reservations, guest satisfaction survey responses, and group sales data, among other details. The central data warehouse plays a key role in Starwood’s ability to track key metrics, forecasting and communicate effectively with its guests.