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Exponential-e & Atlas Hotels Case Study

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About Atlas Hotels

Atlas Hotels is the largest European franchise of Holiday Inn Express, operating 60 hotels across key business and leisure destinations in the UK, and one in Dresden, Germany. With over 20 years' experience in the hospitality sector, Atlas Hotels manages a diverse portfolio of 7,555 hotel rooms, providing business and leisure travellers with unparalleled service and comfort.
The Challenge

Atlas' guests expect the highest quality internet connectivity in their rooms, particularly business travellers who depend on access to critical online services. This placed considerable demands on the resilience of their network and the available bandwidth, with little consistency in the available speeds at different sites.

At the same time, as Atlas' continued its expansion into new locations, seamless cross-site communication and collaboration between staff had become an essential part of its day-to-day operations. However, the Property Management System (PMS) still utilised on-site legacy servers, which increasingly limited the performance and availability of this critical platform, leading to multiple challenges around resource management and operational efficiency.

Atlas Hotels therefore sought to consolidate the disparate network solutions across its various sites under a single supplier. The aim was a unified, 'always-on' infrastructure that would provide seamless, secure, and highly available connectivity for both staff and guests, helping maintain the world-class service quality on which Atlas had built its reputation.

In addition to this foundational connectivity, the digital transformation initiative would also involve a full transition to a modern Cloud environment that would optimise the performance and availability of the PMS, while enhancing scalability and cost control as Atlas continued to expand its portfolio of sites and the range of services it offered its guests.

The Solution

Having a single supplier for a project of this scale is so important. The team at Exponential-e weren't just on hand throughout each phase, ensuring we were able to hit our targets on time and to budget, but they have always been just a call away if we have any concerns. They have also offered invaluable input into ways we can further optimise our guest experience and broaden our range of services.

Ben Otton, IT Manager, Atlas Hotel

Once the project specifications had been defined and agreed upon, Exponential-e worked closely with Atlas Hotels' IT teams at both the head office and various hotel locations across the UK, under the direction of a dedicated Exponential-e project manager, ensuring that their specific needs were met at every stage of the implementation.

The first phase of the project focused on the deployment of highly resilient, 1Gb connectivity across all 60 Atlas Hotels locations, leveraging Exponential-e's own enterprise-class network to ensure consistent quality and availability for all guests and staff, with built-in redundancy to ensure 24/7 availability and minimal downtime. This resulted in double the available internet speeds at multiple sites, particularly those still reliant on legacy connectivity.

The second phase focused on migrating the legacy on-site infrastructure to a secure, highly available private Cloud, configured with end-to-end encryption and advanced firewall protection to guarantee the integrity of guests' data. By moving virtualised servers and workloads into this new environment, the resulting improvements in performance, scalability, and the availability of critical systems – particularly the central PMS – allowed for more efficient resource management, freeing staff to focus on the guest experience.

The entire migration process was completed in six months, with minimal disruption to Atlas' day-to-day operations. For additional levels of resilience, a robust disaster recovery plan was put in place, ensuring business continuity would always be maintained in the event of a system failure or data loss.

The partnership between Exponential-e and Atlas Hotels continues to evolve, with plans already in place to further enhance the guest experience through the application of new technologies. This includes implementing the next generation of interconnected meeting and event spaces at all 60 sites, incorporating advanced AV systems, platforms for simplified booking, and high-performance video conferencing.

With this successful transformation, Atlas Hotels now has a robust, high-performance, and secure digital foundation in place, which will support their ongoing growth and operational excellence. As more locations are added to the Atlas portfolio, Exponential-e will continue to expand and optimise the network infrastructure, ensuring all guests and staff continue to enjoy the highest quality connectivity and new opportunities for improvement can be identified and acted upon.

Solution Benefits

  • Highly resilient 1Gb connectivity available for staff and guests at all 60 Atlas sites across the UK and beyond, encompassing 7,555 hotel rooms

  • Improved communication and collaboration between dispersed staff, with optimal performance and availability for the central PMS

  • A seamless migration to a highly secure private Cloud environment, with in-built redundancy and robust disaster recovery systems minimising the risk of downtime

  • Effortless scalability and potential for future upgrades, supporting Atlas Hotels' ongoing growth and the adoption of emerging technologies
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Balancing safety, security, and unforgettable welcomes in the Pub of the Future

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Like many longstanding institutions, Britain's world-renowned pubs are undergoing their own digital transformation journey, utilising leading-edge technologies to offer truly personalised experiences to patrons of all ages and backgrounds - from longstanding regulars visiting for their usual pint, to families looking for a meal, and young professionals working on the go. It's an exciting time for the sector as a whole, but at the same time, the drive for modernisation must not come at the expense of patrons' safety and enjoyment.

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The pub of the future: the data-driven transformation of a great British institution

The pub of the future: the data-driven transformation of a great British institution

Like many fixtures of our lives, Britain's pubs were heavily impacted by COVID-19, with their familiar patrons unable to come in for a post-work drink, or meet with friends at the weekend. But while it was undoubtedly a difficult period for the industry as a whole, this great British institution did as it has always done, and adapted to suit its patrons' evolving requirements.

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Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group

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Transforming guest experience with UK's first national roll-out of high-speed Internet. Service improved with Internet connection speeds of up to 100 Mbps

About Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group

The Rezidor Hotel Group is one of the fastest growing hotel companies worldwide and a member of the Carlson Rezidor Hotel Group, one of the world's ten largest hotel groups.

Rezidor features a portfolio of more than 435 hotels in operation and under development with over 95,000 rooms in 71 countries.

The decision to use Exponential-e's technology across our UK operations was the result of a stringent tender process. Ultimately its ability to provide us with a wholly owned, 100GigE core Network as well as its understanding of designing a solution which is as important to our brand as the quality of beds, made it the stand out candidate. In today's world, where highly complex software-as-a-service applications plays a vital role in the day to day running of our hotels, having a resilient Internet connection to support them is vital to our ongoing success

Chris Webb - Regional Purchasing Manager


A comprehensive overview of digital transformation for the entire Hospitality & Leisure sector

01  Maintaining the human touch while offering stress-free, contactless stays, from booking to checkout.

02  Accessing new revenue streams through sophisticated data analytics and tailored, omnichannel marketing.

03  Delivering exceptional experiences that turn one-off guests into loyal, repeat customers and help drive brand visibility.

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The Barbican Centre

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A connectivity solution suitable for corporate guests.

About The Barbican Centre

The Barbican Centre (The Barbican) is one of the world's leading arts centres, founded and run by the City of London Corporation. It encompasses dance, film, music, theatre, visual arts and creative learning who work together in creating the model of tomorrow's international arts and learning centre.

The architecturally renowned Centre, now Grade II listed, opened in 1982 and comprises the 1,949 seat Barbican Hall, the 1,166-seat Barbican Theatre, the Pit theatre, a 286 seat cinema, the Barbican Art Gallery, a second gallery The Curve, foyers and public spaces, a library, Lakeside Terrace, roof-top tropical conservatory, conference facilities and three restaurants.

Solution 

After comparing a number of solution providers rigorously, Exponential-e was chosen to deploy a 100Mbps fibre Internet connection. The deciding factors were Exponential-e's professional and responsive approach in designing a solution, its expertise in fibre-based network solutions and experience in the Leisure and Hospitality sector.

Exponential-e provided The Barbican with a significant increase in bandwidth. The additional bandwidth immediately addressed usability issues experienced by Internet users. The extra capacity also provided The Barbican with the scalability needed to create a dedicated WiFi zone for visitors.

The Internet connection provided by Exponential-e enabled The Barbican to deliver multiple services over one connection by splitting VLANs. This meant The Barbican could set and change the bandwidth dedicated to specific services with a few simple keystrokes. This additional flexibility meant that key services such as WiFi or booking services no longer compete for bandwidth. The simplicity in making changes to this service also means that The Barbican is able to provide corporate clients with their own dedicated Internet access to support their events.

Solution benefits

  • Today, The Barbican has state-of-the-art fibre Internet connectivity - matching the world-class concert and meetings facilities. The additional bandwidth has improved the day-to-day performance of Internet based services such as WiFi and ticketing applications. The capability to split multiple services across one connection has given The Barbican the flexibility to not only guarantee the bandwidth provided by business-critical applications, but also to offer dedicated Internet services to clients interested in using The Barbican facilities. The failover connection provides venue with additional resiliency and minimises the risk of network outages.
  • Upgraded from a 2Mbps copper-based Internet services to a 100Mbps fibre-based Internet line.
  • Extra resilience mitigating the risk of network downtime.
  • Increased scalability and flexibility.
  • Ability to offer dedicated bandwidth to third parties.

 Challenges

The Barbican was looking to maintain its position as a world-class venue in a very competitive marketplace. In order to broaden its appeal to corporate clients, The Barbican implemented a £14.1m refurbishment of its conference facilities.

In line with these improvements, The Barbican decided to upgrade its existing 2Mbps copper-based Internet connection, which was being used to capacity. This was having an adverse effect on the speed of web-based services. Applications such as ticketing systems, internal e-mail and WiFi services slowed down as they competed for bandwidth. The Barbican's existing 2Mbps connection also meant there was limited bandwidth capacity to support the growing demand for Internet access at corporate events, conferences and seminars held at The Barbican.

The Barbican decided to upgrade from its copper-based Internet service to a 100Mbps fibre-based Internet connection. A robust failover option would also be installed to provide additional resiliency for Internet services. The additional bandwidth would allow The Barbican to address the immediate issue of slow speeds suffered by Internet users, provide Internet access to corporate clients in keeping with The Barbican's world-class reputation and improve the resiliency of Internet services.

In addition, the project team faced the challenge of adopting a new set of IP addresses. A knock-on effect of this would be the need to re-configure firewalls and make network address translation (NAT) changes. The project team would have to undertake an overnight migration to minimise disruption to visitor services during business hours.

Exponential-e impressed us with its professionalism and know-how in designing a solution to meet our needs. The solution was more cost-effective than the alternatives and was delivered by an expert project team.

Dominic Smith The Barbican.
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Exponential‐e joins forces with at‐visions to become hospitality’s one‐stop digital shop

Exponential‐e joins forces with at‐visions to become hospitality’s one‐stop digital shop

Organisations partner to deliver enhanced connectivity and seamless services for Europe's leading hospitality venues.

Exponential-e has partnered with at‐visions, the specialist global provider of Guest‐Facing Technology for the hospitality and leisure industry, to form the one‐stop shop for all hospitality technology requirements under a single, fully managed, service umbrella.

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