MICROS Systems Develops Intuitive Interface and Improves Functionality of Hospitality and Retail Enterprise Applications
 
 

MICROS Systems Develops Intuitive Interface and Improves Functionality of Hospitality and Retail Enterprise Applications

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MICROS Systems, Inc. is a leading enterprise application provider for the hospitality and retail industries worldwide. More than 330,000 MICROS systems are currently installed in table-service and quick-service restaurants, hotels, motels, casinos, leisure and entertainment, and retail operations in more than 180 countries. Beyond being the only full-systems solutions provider for all market segments within the hospitality and specialty retail industries, MICROS is also the industry leader in providing cloud services through its data centers around the globe. MICROS provides hardware and software for point-of-sale (POS) and operational applications, as well as back-office applications for inventory, labor, and financial management.

For more than 15 years, MICROS—an Oracle Platinum Partner—has worked closely with Oracle, applying industry best practices in the development of its application suite for the hospitality industry, OPERA 5, which was built on Oracle Forms and the Oracle Database. MICROS wanted to develop the next generation of this suite, OPERA 9, to maintain its competitive advantage. As part of this process, MICROS needed to evolve its legacy system into a modern solution with a feature-rich, attractive, user interface that could be distributed via the cloud.

With Oracle SOA Suite, MICROS was able to evolve its suite of hosted enterprise applications to integrate smoothly for customers ranging from hotels and casinos, to airports, while also providing those customers with a friendly and intuitive user interface—all without losing data from the company’s legacy system.

 
 

 
 

Challenges

A word from MICROS Systems, Inc.

  • “Oracle Application Development Framework has enabled us to rapidly develop a rich and compelling user interface that is so intuitive our hotel-enterprise employees require very little training.” – Boro Petrovic, Chief Technology Officer, MICROS Systems, Inc.

  • Create an intuitive and easy-to-learn user interface that significantly reduces the time needed to train ever-changing hotel, restaurant, and other client personnel
  • Deploy an open application architecture to achieve full integration and smoothly running functionality with customer hotel and restaurant reservation, pricing, and other back-office systems
  • Gain ability to customize services to the individual brand and hotel needs
  • Support local languages and legal requirements with minimal customizations as well as Web 2.0 interactive information sharing
  • Enhance business processes by modernizing the application user interface to provide global access and mobile device compatibility, while enhancing workflow and collaboration functions 
  • Improve agility by building applications on SOA to enable various services to evolve independently of one another
  • Leverage the data and knowledge built into the existing Oracle Forms-based solution without impacting the modernization efforts

Solutions

Oracle Product and Services

  • Transitioned OPERA from a client-server application to a full Web client with Oracle SOA Suite and Oracle WebCenter, enabling mobile access and integration with Web 2.0 technologies to better meet hospitality and service industry client needs
  • Designed and developed OPERA 9 using Oracle Application Development Framework and Oracle JDeveloper, ensuring the preservation of data from the legacy system and improving system agility
  • Enabled smooth response to hospitality market trends and product requirements without major re-investments in infrastructure, software, and hardware
  • Evolved platform to deliver customizable specialty hospitality system services through a software-as-a-service platform and more traditional deployments to support tighter integration with various hotels and restaurants’ SOA environments and third-party applications
  • Deployed an open application architecture to achieve full integration and smooth functionality with hotel and restaurant reservation, pricing, and other back-office systems
  • Enhanced multichannel user interface to allow access through traditional methods or via mobile devices, while also reducing training time for hotel and restaurant staff
  • Improved application performance regardless of the end-user’s location, even when accessed over networks with higher latency
  • Supported localizations to better serve the global client base, while also improving development productivity

Why Oracle

One of the biggest challenges for MICROS was to leverage the information from the existing Oracle Forms-based solution, while at the same time modernizing its products and services. The company selected Oracle because its Fusion Middleware technologies—including Oracle Application Development Framework—enabled the company to integrate the more than one thousand worker-years invested in the legacy system into the new technology.

Implementation Process

MICROS Systems’ developers drove the implementation process, and were able to easily learn the Oracle Application Development Framework environment through online training sessions, the Oracle Technology Network, and with the assistance of Oracle’s Worldwide Alliances and Channels team.

“Thanks to the wizard-driven and declarative nature of the Oracle Application Development Framework and the rich library of user interface visual components within it, our developers were proficient in the new environment quickly, enabling high productivity for producing visually attractive applications,” said Boro Petrovic, chief technology officer, MICROS Systems, Inc.

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