Beginning in January 2019, Kirkland steered Choice Hotels through a five-year project that decommissioned more than 3,700 servers, retired 331 outdated software programs, and refreshed 250 applications, fully migrating the hotel chain’s entire system infrastructure to the cloud on Amazon Web Services (AWS). 

“There’s a lot of tech out there that’s tech debt, and a lot of tech that hasn’t been invested in,” says Kirkland, who oversees Choice’s overall IT strategy. “We took up the strategy of, let’s modernize as much as we can as we move to the cloud, so we actually get the benefit of the cloud. And then let’s lift and shift the rest.”

Many hotel chains operate on outdated, decades-old central reservation systems to manage rates, room availability, inventory, and back-office tasks. “Choice was undertaking an endeavor to replace that and purpose build it in the cloud,” Kirkland says. After the 2018 launch of a cloud-based reservation system, ChoiceEdge, the company wanted to do more. 

Alongside AWS, Kirkland worked closely with Choice’s chief financial officer and the finance team to forecast what spending would look like for the multiyear project, as well as predict growth at Choice, historical pricing trends at AWS, and factor in some contingency what-ifs. Kirkland also spent time with other business leaders, including at Capital One, who was halfway through their cloud project.

“A lot of times, people lose sight of what their spend is, and they don’t react until it’s too late,” says Kirkland. Choice put governance and guardrails in place around costs and paid close attention to consumption. A tagging method was deployed to keep track of apps that had servers that were spun up but weren’t in use, or servers that were oversized and could be downgraded to save money.

Choice’s deepening partnership with AWS has also allowed the hotel operator to opt in on future technology advancements. “They change their technology all the time, they are releasing new products all the time,” says Kirkland. “Things I can never try to keep up with if I was trying to do it myself.” 

AWS also helped train 500 Choice employees to get them up to speed for the migration to the cloud.

“A lot of those roles that weren’t cloud enabled before, they needed to learn new tech,” says Kirkland.

The company is a pilot customer of Amazon Connect, using AI technology to more clearly identify customers, create personas with that information, and offer them a more personalized guest experience.

And in 2021, the company debuted ChoiceMax, a mobile-enabled revenue management system that uses the cloud, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to offer rate recommendations. It looks at competitive pricing and other factors—such as a major local sporting event or a Taylor Swift concert—and then makes a rate recommendation, helping maximize the profitability of franchisees’ properties. ChoiceMax is a tech upgrade that Kirkland says wouldn’t be possible without the cloud.

“The reality is data is the source of enabling value in the future,” says Kirkland. “And so how do you bring that data, tie it into your systems, and leverage it is the magic and that’s where a lot of focus is, on trying to make sure that we’re delivering the best value we can tomorrow.”

John Kell

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NEWS PACKETS

IT job market to shrink in 2024. Layoffs in the tech sector have led to projections that the IT jobs market will shrink in 2024 amid AI skills shortages and mismatched salary expectations. The Wall Street Journal reports that jobs in areas like telecommunications, corporate systems management, and entry-level IT have declined, while roles in cybersecurity, AI, and data science keep rising, citing data from consulting company Janco Associates. So far this year, more than 50,000 workers from over 200 tech companies have been laid off.

UnitedHealth’s costly cyberattack. Nearly a month after UnitedHealth disclosed a cybercriminal had breached part of Change Healthcare’s IT network, the health insurance giant said it had paid out more than $2 billion to help health care providers who had been affected by the attack. The scale of the attack is massive: A recent survey found that 94% of hospitals had experienced financial disruptions from the Change Healthcare attack, CNBC reports. The Biden Administration has also launched an investigation into the company, which hasn’t disclosed what kind of data was compromised.

Cisco completes $28 billion Splunk deal. Cisco closed its acquisition of data-crunching software maker Splunk in a relatively speedy six months. The deal gives Cisco more services to sell to corporate customers, including tools that monitor cybersecurity risks. Regulators across the globe have been particularly skeptical of large tech deals, but Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins told Bloomberg that the transaction didn’t attract regulatory scrutiny because the two companies have very different businesses.

ADOPTION CURVE

As corporations integrate AI into their products and services, it's up to management to craft policies about how the technology is used. Many firms are hiring executives with titles like chief AI officer to oversee the development and implementation of AI guardrails and policies. 

But a recent PwC survey of more than 500 business executives shows that progress has been mixed.

Roughly 30% of firms have a Responsible AI strategy in place for parts of their business, according to the survey. But only 39% of executives said they have a company-wide strategy in place for responsible AI.

JOBS RADAR

- Lupin announced the appointment of Christoph Funke to the newly created position of chief technical operations officer. He will be based in Mumbai and will oversee Lupin’s technical operations function, integrating manufacturing, supply chain, and procurement.

- Phreesia named Jack Callahan as CTO after he previously served as the company’s vice president of engineering. Callahan, who has been with Phreesia for 14 years, succeeds Dan Nathan, who will remain with the company as senior engineering advisor.

- Avison Young promoted Martin Jepil to the role of CIO, overseeing the firm’s IT platform and overall architecture. Jepil will oversee CRM and robotic process automation, in addition to key focus areas such as AI.

- Daxtra named Don Tomlinson as CTO, a role previously held by cofounder Steve Finch, who will continue working with Daxtra in an advisory capacity. Previously, Tomlinson led UKG’s acquisition and talent management product portfolio.

- Noblis announced that it will appoint Mark Lay as CIO after he had served previously as deputy CIO. In this role, Lay will report to Noblis chief financial officer Gary Sladic and become a member of its executive council.

- RB Global appointed Nancy King as CTO, effective June 3. Most recently, King served as the senior vice president of product engineering at Target.

- Montage International named Peter Chambers as CIO, where he will oversee and execute the technology strategy for all of the company’s corporate office operations and portfolios of Montage Hotels & Resorts and Pendry Hotels & Resorts.