We’d like to say a very well deserved congratulations to Chris Hewertson, CIO of global hotel group GLH, on his recent second place on the CIO 100 list.

We’ve been working with Chris over the past six months to help him realise his digital vision for GLH. Chris’ approach is a refreshing blend of strategic vision and pragmatic realism, which leverages the best of their existing IT estate to create a digital platform that will provide a significant competitive advantage to the company in the future.

At the core of this strategy is a RESTful API that allows GLH to innovate with their existing inventory of rooms by allowing more flexibility over making reservations or adding additional information to the room. The API also allows third parties to integrate seamlessly and develop additional sales channels for GLH properties.

We are working closely with the GLH team to develop the API by bringing our development expertise to bear, ensuring that the API will be robust, reliable and easy to consume. Our developers have many years of experience both building and consuming APIs, making us uniquely placed to support the successful delivery of the GLH API strategy. Our rigorous development practices such as test automation, continuous integration and refactoring, ensured that the first version of the API was delivered in a matter of months and that new features can be added on a continuous basis.

As well as allowing GLH to innovate more rapidly to identify new revenue streams the API will also allow significant internal cost savings by automating manual back office processes. All of this is made possible by Chris’ commitment to progressing a digital agenda within the business and ensuring that the rest of the business understand the value and opportunity that is being created.

The core technologies that we are using to develop and run the API are:

• Apigee
• Node.js
• Codeship
• Loggly
• Librato
• Runscope