Industry Context

The adoption of efficient digital platforms is now an indispensable requirement in the Hospitality Industry, driving the strategic modernization of hotel management systems. Digitization has become mandatory for hotels to meet their most critical business objectives: achieve growth, lower total cost of ownership, advance operating performance, and improve the guest experience – all while evolving with changing customer needs.  

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Client Challenge

SkyTouch Technology is a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions provider for the hospitality industry. Their flagship Hotel Operations Platform powers over 8,000 hotels throughout the world providing hoteliers key capabilities such as Reservations Management, Inventory Management, Revenue Management, Housekeeping, and best-in-breed integrations with over 140 third-party applications. 

As a pioneer in cloud-based technology for hotels, SkyTouch understands the speed at which cloud technology improves. Core to their value proposition is continual strategic investments in their platform to leverage these advances for the benefit of their customers. The challenge they encountered was how to deliver this value faster than ever before—they enlisted Encora for help. 

Skytouch Client-Challenge

AWS Solution

SkyTouch’s objective was to accelerate the development of specific APIs they would expose to third-party data consumers via their SkyTouch /CONNECT product while also requiring sandboxes for data consumer self-certification processes. Instead of building an entire custom application for this purpose and managing key performance and security aspects (such as users, API rate limits, throttling policies, and scaling up instances), Encora’s team worked with SkyTouch to use native AWS services to create these new capabilities. Using AWS allowed developers to focus on solving the business problem versus the undifferentiated heavy lifting of having to manage traditional infrastructure. 

Skytouch - AWS Solution

Encora’s Approach

Encora worked with SkyTouch to accelerate the advancement of their established cloud architecture and various product offerings. This included contributing to the evolution of their micro-service architecture and DevOps infrastructure, Quality Assurance (QA) support, and assisting with project design and planning. Encora’s highly skilled engineers demonstrated their software development expertise and AWS know-how in the following areas:  

  • Product Engineering & Development: Encora leveraged SkyTouch’s AWS (Amazon Web Services) cloud-native architecture to develop new micro-services. Encora’s team displayed thought leadership and presented new project design proposals for development during these activities 
  • DevOps Continuous Engineering: Encora provided support for a DevOps architecture and executed platform modernization by adopting Docker to enable faster-automated testing 
  • Capability Enablement: Encora assisted in creating and delivering new features for the cloud-based property management platform 
Skytouch - Encoras Approach

Primary AWS Services

AWS is used throughout all SkyTouch environments: development, QA, load testing, pre-production, and production. AWS CloudFormation serves as SkyTouch’s primary tool for realizing Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to manage all deployed AWS infrastructure including compute, storage, as well as all related networking features (security groups, load balancers, public and private domains, etc.). For development, Encora’s team used AWS Lambda, Amazon API Gateway, AWS AWS Cognito, and Amazon SQSSQS to expose APIs to third-party companies in support of the SkyTouch /CONNECT integration platform. In addition, SkyTouch used Amazon Kinesis and Amazon DynamoDB in new applications they created as part of a strategic investment to further leverage micro-services for their core systems.

AWS Cloud Formation-1 Amazon EC2-1 Amazon RDS (1)-1 Group 3 (1) Amazon API Gateway-1 AWS Cognito-1 Amazon SQS-1 Amazon Kinesis-1 Amazon DynamoDB-1

AWS-Enabled Benefits

The use of AWS brought multiple advantages: 

  • AWS Cognito enabled SkyTouch to isolate API authentication and authorization along vendor isolation boundaries for each API they exposed and its associated sandbox. This made user management significantly easier for the SkyTouch support teams
  • Amazon API Gateway enabled SkyTouch to expose service endpoints faster using industry-standard OpenAPI specifications. In addition, when exposed API endpoints received numerous requests, load was handled seamlessly thanks to the Amazon API Gateway’s built-in scalability features 
  • Amazon SQS helped to process requests asynchronously, in a stateless manner assisting with the request load and service resiliency 
  • Services such as Route 53 allowed the team to expose the APIs in SkyTouch domains publicly 
Skytouch Enabled-Benefits

AWS-Enabled Outcomes

  • Scalability of systems due to the use of cloud-native architecture and services  
  • Accelerated automated testing due to continuous infrastructure modernization 
Skytouch AWS-Enabled-Outcomes