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Cendant Putting Linux in 4,000 Hotels
sean dreilinger writes "Hotel franchisor eyes low cost, stability of Linux, but says the OS has its drawbacks.
Cendant Corp., the world's largest franchisor of hotels, is rolling out Linux servers at about 4,000 hotels to run the company's hotel management software.
" It's on the server side, but still a large rollout, nonetheless...
This so called 'upgrade' was annouced about 2 years ago. the official label is 'Project PowerUp'. In reality, it is the biggest piece of horse-shit FUBAR'ed rollout I have ever had the displeasure of even being remotely involved in.
/. material. Suffice to say that if this was a vendor we had hired, we would have dragged them into the parking lot after the first day, tied them to a tree and beat them with a keyboard. An old IBM 5250 keyboard.
I am the lead analyst at a property management company that owns several hotels that are being
forced to perform this upgrade. I will not go into the down and dirty details of this since it is not appropriate
There are three different property management systems available. Each property is assigned a system based on the size of the hotel/motel. The three systems are:
1- Linux based system from HSS (well it was HSS about 18 months ago, its beeen bought out several times during this upgrade).
2- Win 95/Lantastic (no shit) system from MSI
3- Win NT system from Anasazi
The Linux system is the bottom of the line system for the smallest hotels. Virtually no support for call accounting, in-room movie, credit card, point of sale, catering or voice mail systems. This system is the pits. Its not the fault of Linux, its just a poor product from a mediocre (at best) software company.
The MSI system sucks as well. The fileserver is Windows 95 using Lantastic networking. What mental giant thought this up? These are critical systems that need to run 24x7. This is the system we've been stuck with and its actually semi-stable after massive tweaking.
The Anasazi system is not even being installed. After two years it still cannot pass quality control.
The bottom line....
This install IS NOT GOOD PRESS FOR LINUX!
Due the the crappy software installed on the linux system and the the total lack of ability of the Cendant and Synergy (who are doing the actual nstalls) installers, these installs are almost always complete failures. The small franchise owners who do not have a computer department and who are not familier with computers are litterally begging to be 'upgraded' to the MSI system.
Arrgh! My brain hurts just thinking about this (*^$%$@$! I need beers....
"Linux's less-mature setup infrastructure increases the up- front work required to deploy an application, but companies find the struggle worthwhile because Linux is more stable than Windows NT."
- Andrew Allison
I don't know about the rest of you, but personally, I'd prefer to choose good over easy every time. This is an intelligence thing. The intelligent would rather struggle than accept inferior solutions.
... and today's pet project has
Well the people who work in these hotels
doubtless have wordprocessing, and payroll
and so on. It would be easier for me to
train people to use CRT or whatever than
to train them to use CRT, StarOffice, GnuMeric,
and whatever accounting packages that don't
even exist yet, they probably want to print,
they sure don't want to learn TeX... or even
what lpr is...
Okay, so bring it on... What full-charge accounting systems are available for linux?
Don't write to me about CBB. QuickBooks and
Peachtree probably work fine under VMWare, but
that doesn't count.
Point is, there is a whole world of software
that hasn't been touched by the free software
community, nor even developed *for* the free
platforms... Probably because it lacks interest
for technologists. We have a surfeit of
applications that are useful to technologists (various nerds) (you), but we are talking about
the desktop application market... So who's working on accounting, billing, ledger, payroll
and ics systems? These are things that really
do need to be mature before suits will buy them.
I don't think I'd base a real business' inventory
or trial balance on beta software. I'm not trying
to pull MS vs. AlternativeOS strings here, just
realizing out loud that the sort of computerization
desired in a business like a hotel might not be
provided in the current free software idiom.
The accounting software for Windows isn't that good either! (so don't take this comment the wrong way!)
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
To make some kind of point as to how easy linux is to setup, in the past three days, I:
- Built a PC from spare parts I had (p60 MB, 16MB RAM, VGA, 2 ethernet cards, 150 & 250MB HDs, and fd0).
- Made 9 floppies for Debian install (first time using Debian was the same week.)
- Installed Debian base, manually configured DHCP to get my cable modem.
- Ran dselect, which ftp'd the rest of what I needed (GNU, etc.)
- Recompiled the kernel w/ IP masqing
- Setup ethernet & IP masqing
- Coming to you live right now off a IP masq'ed windows box with my very own web server in my closet running debian linux. Took me 2 1/2 days. Now I just have to put some web pages up
:)
This is the reason I get annoyed when technical competent people (like hotel sysadmins) complain about the hard installation of linux.--