Oracle Hospitality Stumbled in Micros Integration But Says It Has Recovered - 1 views
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Three years ago, business software maker Oracle acquired Micros, a hotel and restaurant technology company, for $5.3 billion in cash.
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Micros was the market leader. More hotels used Micros’s software to check in and check out guests than any other company’s reservation management software.
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Oracle found the integration of Micros tough sledding in a few ways. Execution of the merger did not meet the expectations of many hotel customers.
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Oracle was caught off guard. As a company not used to dealing with call-center-based customer service, it suddenly had to handle help desk requests for thousands of vendors
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It took Oracle awhile to figure out how to plot a multi-year transition of Micros customers from license-based deals to Web-based, subscription services.
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One hotelier said, “I know that Oracle recognizes that and [they are] very open about how much investment they need to make, but it is a risk to us as a business. As we are looking to try and innovate, not being able to plug other systems into Opera easily constrains what we can do.”
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The first hotel group to agree to move all of its properties to Oracle’s cloud-based property management system is Mövenpick,
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“We’re the number one provider of property management systems in North American and worldwide,” he said. “We’re also taking market share in geographies where Micros had operated through partners.
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Since the acquisition, the company boosted its number of customer service representatives by more than 30 percent to better handle the volume of requests
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One global benchmark was to cut the wait time for customers calling the help desk to under two minutes, on average. The company is now meeting that goal, he said.The company set a goal of resolving at least 70 percent of customer support requests within an hour. Webster said it is now achieving that.
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A typical global brand might have a dozen agreements with local Micros offices. Oracle streamlined the patchwork of deals into a single worldwide agreement.
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“We’ve made massive progress in bringing [the Micros property management system] Opera to the cloud,” Webster said.
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et us reduce the training time for staff by almost half and improve the speed of service for guests by nearly 40 percent.”
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We’ve innovated in hardware, too. In the last year, we’ve been able to bring our complete new line of hardware onto tablets, not just fixed work stations, and a complete line of mobile solutions for our Opera property management system. We brought out a new housekeeping operations application via mobile, too.”
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We’re now focused on helping our hotel customers create exceptional guest experiences while reducing the cost and complexity of IT.” He said hotels using Oracle no longer need database administrators or other IT support staff to manage the technology.
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Opera Property Management System for multi-tenant hotels has integrations with more than 1,400 third-party tools, such as for accounting and revenue management.
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Christian Weste, the boss of Hotel Lundia in Sweden, wrote: “Seems to be the same all over Europe and probably the rest of the world also. It takes months to get in touch with someone and even then the issue will most likely not be solved.”
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Oracle Hospitality has responded to competition by widening the aperture of its target market. While Micros had tended to focus on larger hotels and chains, Oracle Hospitality says it wants it all — from so-called tier-one hotels in global capitals down to small independents in tiny corners of the globe.
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Oracle’s pricing strategy may tell a different story. Its relatively high fees tends to favor large chains and pose obstacles for small group and independent hotels.
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Oracle will win the day only if it acts as a platform that can play nicely and affordably with new third-party tools, such as for revenue management; new businesses, such as alternative lodging, and new ways of doing business, such as alternative forms of payment like Apple Pay, Alipay, bitcoin, and Google Wallet.
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Three years ago Oracle was able to buy out the leading company in hotel and restaurant technology, Micros. But the transition was quite tough on the company leaving many customers dissatisfied with the service they were receiving. One reason for this is because Oracle was not used to call-center based customer service making it quite difficult for them to adapt on their side but it was also difficult for the customers to adapt to taking all their data online to the cloud. In order to keep happy customers Oracle was able to boost the number of customer service representatives which made each and every customer have a shorter wait time and also the they are able to serve more customers as well. Oracle has also taken the step into streamlining the agreements with their customers into one global agreement making the service across the board on the same level, they were able to get more companies on the cloud, they were able to reduce training time by making the systems more user friendly and also have changed the PMS system to be on separate hardware such as tablets. They have also decided not only to focus on the hardware and IT aspect, but make it possible for hotels to give the best experience possible by adding more tools to track guest information but also for revenue and accounting management. At the time there are still many opposers to the systems and are being voices by many General Managers of the world but with the improvements they are bound to please more customers.
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This article talks about hotels investing and implementing micros as their main system.
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For three years now, Oracle has been the owner of Micros, a software that manages payments and reservations for more than 300,000 hospitality owners. This article speaks on how Oracle has been handling the transition, and the obstacles they are facing now, including competition from other hospitality softwares that hotels around the world are using. Most softwares today are using cloud based systems, but Oracle was having some mishaps with that transition, therefore making customers unhappy. To relieve some of the tension between customers and the company, there hired about 30% more representatives to handle the volume of requests, and questions from Oracle users. With more research and more representatives, 70% of customer support requests are being resolved within an hour. With time of the essence in the hospitality world, this is an important aspect for users of the system. Competition is out there, and price is a large factor for small and family owned businesses that cannot afford the Oracle system, but they are now working on widening their marker to independently owned hotels from anywhere around the globe. Being a user of Micros in my own place of work, the computer software makes it easy for both the employee and the guests, with straightforward prompts and payments that deliver little to no hassle. Oracle would like to keep on growing and with the rate that they have overcome their mishaps and learned to adapt to new technologies such as ApplePay and Bitcoin, it seems it can only go up from here.