Colt powers ABBA Hotels’ innovation and technology

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The flexibility, availability and security of ABBA Hotels’ systems have all increased thanks to Colt’s solutions.  

As part of its 2008-2009 expansion plan, the ABBA Hotels chain intended to open new centres, requiring the most secure and flexible telecommunications solutions, capable of coping with this expansion process. The choice of Colt services has been pivotal within the investment plan, the cost of which amounts to around €300,000 in development
and security.  

The main benefits for ABBA Hotels include:  

• A significant drop in the number of disruptions in communications services on account of the benefits the new technological structure offers the systems department.
• Having infrastructure ready to offer new and more ambitious communication services.
• Improving ABBA Hotels’ management and customer service. This difference can be seen when managing reservations and checking the availability of any given room. The hotels individually and the chain as a whole present the customer with a better quality, innovation and technologically precise image with the adoption of these systems.  

The Spanish ABBA Hotels chain currently has 22 establishments in 15 Spanish cities and three elsewhere in Europe. They are top-of the-range hotels designed for their guests’ comfort. They are located in large towns and cities, with modern facilities, and a telecommunications infrastructure and services that provide added value both to customers and the group’s own staff.

The company needed a telecommunications and technology structure centred on the following three basic requirements:

• All services common to the hotels to be centralised in a single data centre, thus simplifying and monitoring all communications processes efficiently.
• To have robust, reliable and flexible communications for future expansion.
• To have a maximum speed connection between the central services and the data centre under contract to increase agility and have greater responsiveness.  

Before signing up to the Colt services, ABBA Hotels had a Frame Relay communications system centralised in the Barcelona head office. There was no ADSL available and everything was dependent on the “unstable” centre in that office. This caused some disruption of the service which has now been solved.  

Secure operations

The centralisation of telecommunications services in a secure location, the Colt Data Centre, has enabled ABBA Hotels to forget about problems due to power outages or line breaks at the exchange, something which also had repercussions for the rest of the hotels.  

The most complex phase of development with Colt was the start-up of the solutions in the Colt data centre, as the VPNs (virtual private networks) in each hotel had to be recreated for the location of the central services. The opportunity was taken with these changes to set up a new VPN in each hotel with Fortinet equipment managed by Ezone and thus to achieve a perimeter security system to prevent any unauthorised access to the hotel chain’s information
or systems.  

“We allowed for all internal and external security factors from the outset in designing the ABBA Hotels communications structure, maintaining perimeter security and internal surveillance at all times which would guarantee stability for all our systems”, points out Alex Barnadas, Head of Communications and Security for the hotel chain.  

Colt selected one of its main partners in this country for the development and implementation of this communications infrastructure: WSIT. “It is a pleasure and a major responsibility for WSIT to provide ABBA Hotel’s telecommunications needs. ABBA Hotels is without doubt a benchmark in the hotels and catering sector and the high service level requirements for this account make us more aware of current needs, future concerns and the importance of having reliable communications for the sector” observes Mario Puig, Managing Director of WSIT.  

The switch from ADSL to fibre optics was very simple, it was carried out by means of a simple cable swap in the physical facility in the hotel and reprogramming the VPN. A 10 Mb line was also taken up from the exchange to the Colt Data Centre, in response to the need to make the new physical location of the equipment transparent. Users did not perceive any loss of speed in communications during the process.