Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide Inc. has selected Tangosol Coherence as the company's standard data Grid/clustered caching software worldwide. To meet rapidly increasing demands for online access to its hotel-booking applications, Starwood is deploying Coherence to build a standard framework to access data across an extensive distributed data grid.

Starwood is an owner, operator and franchiser of hotels and resorts with the internationally renowned brands, including Sheraton, Four Points by Sheraton, St. Regis, The Luxury Collection, Le Meridien, W, Westin and the recently announced Aloft. The White Plains, N.Y.-based company has more than 950 properties in more than 95 countries around the world.

Starwood has been transitioning from a legacy IT system to a flexible service-oriented architecture (SOA) to take advantage of the growing industry trend of Internet booking as today's primary channel for hotel room reservations (in 2005, a J.D. Power and Associates study showed that 41 percent of all hotel reservations were booked online, an increase from 36 percent in 2004; 68 percent of the online bookings were made through hotel Web sites, also up 17 percent from 2004.)

Tangosol Coherence is a key component of Starwood's SOA approach because it will permit faster online hotel bookings from a more comprehensive offering of available rooms across the company's entire inventory.

"We evaluated solutions from several vendors and determined that Tangosol Coherence provides what we need: reliability, high performance, flexibility to stay ahead of data access demand and the means to offer extraordinary service to our customers," explained Israel del Rio, Starwood's senior vice president of technology solutions. "For Starwood, this translates directly into competitive advantage and real cost savings."

Tangosol Coherence provides Starwood with important benefits:

• The fastest access to application data for the highest level of customer service.

• Reduced costs by eliminating round-trip transactional time, expensive XML parsing and encoding, and recurring computations and data access.

• Scalability for future growth across J2EE clusters and distributed systems.

• Reliable management of transactional state across clusters/systems.

• Predictable IT costs.

The completed Starwood data grid environment will encompass Web services accessible by all of its hotel chains, partners and customers. The previously independent applications of each hotel chain are being merged into the larger corporate SOA. In addition to providing better performance and lower cost, the Starwood SOA enables customization for each of its brands, yet there are many shared functions, features, and tools that reduce development and operating costs.