ITT Corp’s ITT Sheraton Corp, the Boston-based global hotel operator, has gone to Hewlett-Packard Co and ECI Computer Inc to implement what it claims is the hotel industry’s most advanced worldwide information system, giving the two companies a contract valued at more than $14m. As part of a multiyear plan to integrate its proprietary central-reservations and property-management systems, ITT Sheraton plans to implement an open systems environment using HP 9000 Series 800 business servers installed at most of the nearly 450 Sheraton Hotels worldwide, enabling them to retrieve important customer data quickly from the company’s Reservatron IV system, and also – it is hoping – manage their daily business operations more efficiently; Reservatron IV enables a customer or travel agent to make reservations anywhere in the world by using the company’s toll-free telephone numbers. The loser in the award of the contract is NCR Corp – Sheraton’s proprietary hotel-management software ran on Tower 600 Unix machines.
