STARWOOD'S MAINFRAME IS READYTO CHECK OUT

摘要

Starwood hotels & resorts worldwide for nearly four years has been converting its IT environment to a services-oriented architecture while the hotelier's core centralized reservation system remained a legacy mainframe-based application. Gateways sitting in front of the mainframe would translate the older data for use in Web services so it can be called by the newer, more nimble applications around it. Even though the gateway approach worked, it also has translated into higher computing costs, sluggish performance, and a potential point of failure. And, says executive VP and chief technology officer Tom Conophy, recruiting Cobol specialists has become particularly tough.