SOA is more than tying together back-end systems. It can also serve as a strategy to advance a unified communications platform that enhances the customer experience.
Dana Gardner provides this account of the Seaport Hotel's in-room "Seaportal" application, built using SOA principles to attain a true IP convergence features. The hotel pulled together VOIP, unified communications, SOA, Web services and external information sources — all with a touch-screen interface for the hotel's guests. The touch-screen terminals run on thin clients with Windows Embedded XP.
"Seaportal may well define the next generation of hotel-based communications and information access services," Dana writes. "It also helps the hotel monetize its services better (now that making money from phone calls is history). It newly empowers guests and traveling business workers to get what they need quickly and easily in terms of information, access, unified communications and entertainment."
Business intelligence plays a key role here. "When guests access their needed or desired services from the portal, that use pattern can be tracked and examined," Dana explains. A guest's individual preferences can be observed, measured, and therefore enhanced, either on this trip or the next. "Before such use was scattered amid different communications functions and networks, and hard to capture and measure."
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