Holiday Inn Club Vacations is a national resort company that offers premier family vacation experiences to their timeshare members traveling in the United States.
As one of the most recognizable names in hospitality, Holiday Inn Club delivers luxurious vacation experiences across 31 United States resorts. As a data-driven organization, they leverage multiple databases and business applications to track, engage, and evolve their complex marketing, sales, and financial processes. But over the past 10 years, Holiday Inn Club has seen increased volumes, transactions, and demands for data – putting strain on their existing infrastructure.
Limitations with their legacy IT systems led to multiple outages and system reboots every day, so Holiday Inn Club decided to migrate their customer-centric operations to Salesforce. The goal was to support organizational growth and better surface the massive volumes of transactional data for finance, sales, and marketing departments to analyze.
The problem? Holiday Inn didn’t have a good way of getting their data from Salesforce to their reporting platforms for business intelligence initiatives. They needed a reliable data replication solution to synchronize more than 20 million records from their new Salesforce instance to their various on-prem and cloud data warehouses to enable robust near real-time reporting.
After combing through various integration offerings on the market to find the right solution, Toledo found CData Sync – and had his solution up and running in production in just two weeks.
The CData data integration solution virtually eliminated the need for troubleshooting and manual data retrieval. Now, various departments across Holiday Inn Club can access and analyze up-to-date customer and account data from their preferred reporting platforms.
The Challenge: Organizational Growth Leads to Data Disruption
The IT team at Holiday Inn Club struggled with the limitations of their SQL database. Increased daily transactions and requests forced them to have to reset their servers every few hours, as they became sluggish under high-volume workloads. Data retrieval delays were starting to affect Toledo’s ability to provide timely insights into sales commissions, marketing projections, and payments information.
After standardizing on Salesforce for operations, Toledo urgently needed a robust data replication solution to get huge amounts Salesforce Service Cloud data into his Azure and on-prem SQL servers for use across multiple departments.
"We tried to use SSIS and Azure Data Factory and none of those worked as we wanted them to,” said Toledo. “We had issues with watermarks and configurations and ended up with a huge gap in data because the jobs took so long to run. That’s when we decided to start discovery for a tool that allowed us to do huge synchronization jobs in near-real-time.”
The Solution: Reliable Data Replication in Just Two Weeks
CData Sync stood apart in Toledo’s discovery process as the only tool that provided a successful proof-of-concept (POC) for Holiday Inn Club. In just two weeks, Toledo had a data integration solution running in production, and his end users were quickly relying on CData Sync to drive their initiatives forward.
“I’m really impressed with the technology, how it actually works, and the thought that went into every single one of the options you can find when you go to the GUI (graphical user interface),” said Toledo. "I wanted to move [my data] from Point A to Point B and create these connections, and all of the options for that are laid out for me. You can also see how you can expand those connections when you’re building that synchronization process. It’s really amazing to me.”
“I’m really impressed with the technology, how it actually works, and the thought that went into every single one of the options you can find when you go to the [interface].”
– Irving Toledo, Holiday Inn Club Vacations Senior Software Architect
“Another good feature that we like about CData is the fact that you don’t store any data,” Toledo expanded. “You’re not compromising my data the way other vendors might by taking it from the source and moving it to their own cloud, then moving back to the destination. So, the fact that we can put our data on-prem in our own servers or put it in Azure – it’s my choice. I like the flexibility there.”
CData Sync is now a core component of Holiday Inn Club’s data ecosystem – replicating massive volumes of Salesforce data every other minute into their Azure cloud database and SQL Server instance on-premises. End-users across finance, sales, and marketing can now access all the data they care about for holistic reporting in Power BI without worrying about delays, errors, or outages.
“I can sleep again, knowing that the replication is working. If I stopped CData Sync today, I’d get flooded with calls from my teams in the next 20 minutes. The near-real-time data we get with Sync has transformed how we work in a big way.”
– Irving Toledo, Holiday Inn Club Vacations Senior Software Architect
Now, it’s simple for Holiday Inn Club to reliably calculate sales projections, track outstanding payments for vacation packages, optimize marketing campaigns, and provide seamless experiences for their timeshare owners.
Toledo has been so pleased with their Salesforce replication that they have continued to integrate other systems. For instance, Holiday Inn Club’s email marketing campaigns reach millions of people every month, generating massive monthly Salesforce data volumes of around five to six million records. To handle this workload, Toledo is now using Sync to replicate data from Salesforce Marketing Cloud.
Toledo is also expanding his use case with Sync even further, conducting a POC to replicate data from Holiday Inn Club’s Oracle-based mortgage platform, Daybreak, as well.
“Right now, we have an SSIS job that consistently fails to fetch the Oracle data and move it to our SQL Server,” said Toledo. “Basically, Sync will help us avoid the situation of having to reset and fix retrieval jobs by allowing me to pull the data down under a different schema, so everyone’s fetching data as normal — and I don’t have to change anything major.”
