UPDATED 20:30 EST / DECEMBER 20 2018

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Q&A: How Wyndham hotels keep pace with digital hospitality

In a market dominated by a demand for instant solutions available at the click of a button, customers have come to expect a seamless digital experience from businesses in every industry. Traditional organizations working within legacy computing systems must modernize or face obsolescence.

To remain competitive with digital hospitality competitors like A‌i‌r‌b‌n‌b‌ I‌n‌c‌.‌, Emmanuel Offiong (pictured, left), vice president of enterprise architecture at Wyndham Hotel Group LLC, is making an investment in digital transformation through a partnership with analytics company AppDynamics Inc.

Offiong and Prathap Dendi (pictured, right), general manager of growth initiatives and commercialization at AppDynamics, spoke with John Walls (@JohnWalls21) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during AWS re:Invent in Las Vegas. They discussed the economy’s evolving modernization standards and how AppDynamics is helping create a seamless digital experience at Wyndham with the help of Amazon Web Services Inc. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following answers have been condensed for clarity.]

Walls: Making that big digital jump, it’s a leap of faith. Before your decision, what was the impetus?

Offiong: There was a lot of competition with online travel agents, and we weren’t bringing in customers the way we thought we could. Our digital platforms were antiquated, check-in/check-out process wasn’t as seamless as it could be, it wasn’t very mobile friendly. In our franchisees, their ultimate goal is to be able to check revenue [and] see what competitors are doing seamlessly on a mobile platform. We didn’t have those capabilities available, and in today’s economy in order to attract customers we had to be more digital friendly.

Walls: What weren’t you doing that AppDynamics is getting up to speed?

Offiong: Going to the cloud, especially with the type of workloads we were looking at, is often a very complicated and complex adventure. We wanted to get out of the business of managing infrastructure, and that’s where AppDynamics came in. We needed something to allow us to see end-to-end where we started from, and when we migrate to the cloud, have that same level of visibility.

Dendi: When leaders like Emmanuel talk about digital transformation, they’re not talking about IT transformation; they’re not talking about servers going away, infrastructure. It’s really refreshing to see customers talk about business model changes. Their team has done a great job focusing on business model needs and getting that end-user experience from the time they log-in.

This is hard stuff, to make it simple for the end-user passes the complexity down to the systems, and that’s what the team at Wyndham was able to do. We’re lucky to be part of that journey that monitors the end-to-end performance of the end-user and then correlate that to business outcomes.

Knight: How has the business changed?

Offiong: We migrated 8,400 hotels across 18 brands onto this new platform. We’re up 75 percent in mobile bookings as a result of these changes. Our customers have given us feedback that the experience is much more seamless. Our franchisees have given us feedback that it’s easier to use our services.

Dendi: Every business function is getting melded into that one end-user experience so security becomes, not an afterthought, but actually is part of the design construct. Wyndham [has] gotten so much better at measuring right from the click stream of reservation to fulfillment and looking for anomalies in that data, so security correlation to the application data is out of the box now.

Walls: Obviously, this is a multi-year process. I assume you have much more work to do. What haven’t you done?

Offiong: We’ve migrated most of what we were looking to migrate over the last two years, and now we’re looking [to] get more insights from the data that’s available.

Dendi: Ecosystem around application stack has gotten so transparent, so customers like Wyndham are able to purchase best-of-breed solutions like AppDynamics on AWS Marketplace, click of a button. They’re generating trillions of data sets every day across their business. Our goal is to see how can we bubble up the impact of that investment to their line of business.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of AWS re:Invent. (* Disclosure: AppDynamics Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither AppDynamics nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE

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