Simplify or Struggle: How Stonebridge IT is Rethinking Hotel Tech

Glenn: [00:00:00] Hey, everybody. It’s our hospitality. Friend Glenn with a horrible shirt collar. Let me fix that. Starting again? Hey, everybody. It’s your hospitality friend Glenn here. And I’m with Nasim Mansurov, Senior Vice President, Information Technology at Stonebridge Companies. We’re talking all things it. But first I want to thank our friends over at Unifocus, unifocus; technology that delivers value. Check them out at unifocus.com. All right, man, we’re just talking before you went on air. You guys are crazy enough to do all the technology in house. That’s right. How’s that? I mean, it’s got to give you greater control, but that’s a lot of responsibility for a guy like you.

Nasim: [00:00:35] Yeah, yeah, without a doubt. But, you know, the main idea here is that a lot of companies like us, hotel management companies will use third party resources. Msps, we call the managed service providers. And the idea here is that they don’t want to overburden their departments by outsourcing it to somebody else, which is understandable if you have a very small team in our environment. We understood that whenever you use an MSP, you have a lot of interdependencies because MSP coming in and trying to be that layer. When a hotel has a problem, they have to contact the MSP and then MSP is calling HSC providers, ISPs, all these. So they’re trying to be the intermediary. They’re not actually technical people in most cases.

Glenn: [00:01:14] Now, that sounds to me like it could lead to a lot of miscommunications. That doesn’t get that problem.

Nasim: [00:01:18] Yes. A lot of people will end up doing this, right. You’re pointing at each other, blaming each other for the problem. And this is where we realize we can do this much better than them. Because we understand our hotels, we understand our infrastructure. We put that infrastructure ourselves into the hotel. So all of the back office, front office, you know, if you have a height environment, for example, right, where we control every single machine in the environment, we create a login. So why do we need to go through a third party and make it more complicated? So that’s part of the reason why we do this in house. And we realize we can copy this formula across the board. So it’s a very optimized system and we simplify. The key is simplification because if you have a ton of different systems and you’re trying to do everything at once, that’s when you run.

Glenn: [00:01:59] That’s kind of where the rub is. Because we’re in a hospitality environment, you have to do so much at once. So how do you balance the needs of what the organization needs to propel forward while still retaining that essential control? That’s a cornerstone.

Nasim: [00:02:12] Yeah. So I think the biggest key here is to try to be in when I say simple. Yeah. For example, when it comes to systems, we go serverless. What it means is every device that we have is cloud connected. There is no. For example. Most hotels will have something like Active Directory domain control. Right. And you log in to them and you create the units. We don’t have that. Everything that we have is on the cloud. You know it goes through Azure AD. And what that means is from the technical standpoint, if you remove the infrastructure from the hotel and you keep it as simple as possible, you can scale up and down. We can add users, remove users, control all of that through the cloud. App makes makes things simpler.

Glenn: [00:02:49] So I’m actually I’m actually a little surprised not at you for going to the cloud at companies that still have not and are leaving servers at the property level. I would have sworn that was an early, you know, AWS issue. You know.

Nasim: [00:03:02] I think in hospitality we always deal with technology that’s outdated. And a lot of people struggle with that. You know, we put all this infrastructure many years ago, and now the brands are realizing that this heavy footprint is making things tougher. You know, for example, Marriott, Hilton, they’re switching to cloud systems. Hilton with their Pep. You know Marriott is going you know, their own CMS on the cloud as well.

Glenn: [00:03:25] And to give them credit It takes it’s going to take years and a bajillion dollars in order to do that.

Nasim: [00:03:30] Yes, but it leads to simplification, right? When you don’t have an on prem server, there’s no tapes to rotate. There’s no thing manual processes in place. You just run through everything automated. And that’s the idea. So the core idea is if you can get rid of as much infrastructure as possible, then you reduce the need for hardware for people on site or, you know, dealing with all kinds of issues because, you know, if you have a power outage, it’s okay. Right. So what? Right. You switch to your backup link.

Glenn: [00:03:57] You’re good. All right. So say I have a hotel. I’m coming on board to the Stone bridge family. What do I have to worry about, then? When it comes to switching over all my technology and responsibility going?

Nasim: [00:04:08] So, you know, you’re very likely tied to some MSP contract, right? So the first thing we ask is, is there a contract in place? If there is no contract in place, we literally just I send my team, we go to the hotel, we assess all the infrastructure that you have and we literally start ripping it out. Right. And we replace it with cloud connected technology. Every switch, every router that we have is cloud connected so that we can remote, remotely manage all the infrastructure. And every single machine then gets connected to our system as well. And so we reduce the footprint and we tell you okay. You know, two years, three years from now, you don’t have to worry about hardware refreshes, buying new and replacing the hardware. Because we’ve done that work initially. We simplify and then that hotel becomes easier to manage too. That’s how we can do this with a very small team.

Glenn: [00:04:53] And I’m already just thinking if you don’t have any machines on property, then those are never going to become outdated.

Nasim: [00:04:58] Yeah, right.

Glenn: [00:04:58] Yeah. Because I think about like my first computer, an IBM PC XT or something like that. Right now they’re in the Smithsonian if you want to go check them out. Anything else that I’m missing?

Nasim: [00:05:08] I think that’s the key. Yeah. Yeah. These are exciting times because I’m looking forward to where, you know, we don’t have to deal with key service because there’s still some infrastructure that you cannot live without. Right? But once that goes to the cloud, then all we’re going to have is just switching networking. It’s going to be easier.

Glenn: [00:05:24] Right. Awesome. And don’t confuse anything of what we just said with AI. That’s a whole other issue. And I’m very relieved we had a conversation without those two letters coming up. Although I guess I ruined it by bringing it up now. You made things seem so much easier. I really I really love your enthusiasm. All right, now, team Glenn, you’re you. You need focus. Com check you all out later. Bye bye.