Hilton Hotels Corporation ranked #2 on the 2008 Information Week 500

Hilton Hotels Corporation - a well known advocate of IBM Informix database technology - was ranked #2 on the 2008 Information Week 500. This represents the Highest Ranking of a Hospitality & Travel Company in 20-Year History of Rankings !

It is the superior IDS Technology that powers their backend systems, replicating data between several instances to build a highly available and scalable database grid. The power and efficiency of Informix allows them - like many other companies (Walmart, Cisco, Verizon, Visa, Network IP, Deutsche Telekom, DHL etc.) - to stay ahead of the competition.

Congratulations to Hilton and to IIUG speaker Thomas J. Girsch who is the responsible DBA for the Informix databases at Hilton. Well done !

Excerpt:

DAvE (Distributed Availability Engine) is a solution developed to allow on-line shoppers 
to browse and web buyers to buy both with more efficiencies to enhance their overall 
web experience within the Hilton.com websites. In essence, this engine offloads web 
shopping traffic to a lower cost, paralleled reservation system thus allowing buyers 
to reach distribution channels with more speed and accuracy. DAvE effectively lowers 
costs, opens more opportunities to consumers to purchase, and reduces traffic jams on 
the web sites. The system itself is a group of Intel servers running a slim version of 
our reservation application on Red Hat Linux. DAvE communicates across an upgraded 
gigabit network with replicated Informix databases responding to availability 
request transactions from Global distribution Systems (e.g. airline systems) allowing 
Hilton to extend the capacity of its distribution environments in ways that 
had never been feasible before. 

Read the complete press release here