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Intercontinental Hotels Group Optimizes Application Performance with OPNET’s ACE

With over 3,600 hotels in nearly 100 countries, Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG) serves more than 120 million guests a year at their Intercontinental Hotels, and other hospitality brands such as Crowne Plaza, Holiday Inn and Candlewood Suites. The hotels are administered centrally from Atlanta, GA. IHG use OPNET regularly as part of an extensive application certification process, as well as for capacity planning and troubleshooting requirements.

ICHG Optimizes Its Invoice Processing Application with OPNET’s ACE

Before relocating their local invoice processing center to India, IHG profiled a key application with OPNET’s ACE module.

Gary Abbott, Network Capacity Planner, identified three critical questions:

• What impact would sending scanned invoices halfway around the world have on the WAN? Would a network upgrade be required to support the relocation?
• Would transaction response be affected, such that additional staff would be needed to sustain transaction volume?
• How well would the Citrix-based invoice processing application be supported?

ACE was used to assess the invoice processing application, Acorde, and quickly revealed frequent messaging in a transaction that would reduce the efficiency of communications. Additionally, it was determined that the Citrix default was set to check for keyboard or mouse movements 30 times every second, potentially introducing severe network bottlenecks and impacting response times. By adjusting this parameter to 5 times a second, IHG reduced the application’s bandwidth overhead to a fifth of what it was, and considerably improved the application’s projected response times.

IHG also used ACE QuickPredict to model the response time for a user processing an invoice in New Delhi, based on response times observed for a user in Atlanta. “Our predicted response time through OPNET was within two percent of the actual response time," Abbott emphasized.

OPNET Accelerates Application Certification Process

IHG’s IT organization, based in Atlanta, is responsible for the performance and availability of key business applications, including the reservations system, accounting services, the Priority Club loyalty program, market statistical analysis, and standard file/print services.

Abbott states: “About one in five applications has dysfunctional behavior, but the only certain way to find out which one, is to certify them all.” The Network Engineering group performs application certifications for one or two applications every month. The complete process is extensive. It involves several days spent capturing, analyzing and reporting. Without ACE, this task would be significantly more tedious and prolonged.

The Network Engineering team also finds ACE’s AppDoctor function invaluable for detecting latent application problems. Abbott states: “ACE is easy enough to use that even a novice can leverage it to identify problems that would ordinarily require considerable expertise to uncover. Because of ACE every member of my team can make valuable contributions with half the effort.”

Gary Abbott
Network Capacity Planner
Intercontinental Hotels Group (IHG)