Transforming the Hotel Industry: Protel's Cloud-Native PMS Migration Success Story

The Protel hospitality platform is the best-in-class for hotels and hotel groups that want a sophisticated solution for their ecosystem, with flexibility and world-class quality. It connects all types of hospitality technologies into one standard, accessible framework. In order to stay sharp through challenging periods of fast technology advances whilst keeping its highly maintained reputation, Protel management deduced that they needed app migration and modernization.

The purpose of the whole project centered around modernizing the existing software offering into a cloud-native application. Cloud-native applications are designed and built specifically to run on cloud infrastructure, taking advantage of cloud services and features to ensure scalability, resilience, efficiency, enhanced performance, improved customer satisfaction and reduced operational overhead.

From the business point of view, application modernization meant greater flexibility, easier maintenance, better user experience and simplified use of the whole system. One of the key things our client needed was the seamless implementation of new functionalities while the main system was running. It means that the system isn't frozen while being technologically modernized but is supplemented with new options for end users.

For this complex endeavor, Protel's in-house digitalization team needed trusted outsourced partners instead of direct hiring or onboarding their own teams of developers. That's when they found out about Serengeti through a recommendation.

WHY SERENGETI?

Key factors which differentiated us from other software development and consultancy companies were our experience in the hospitality domain, our ability to quickly deliver resources, to the ability to provide guarantees, and our client's review of similar existing projects. Before anything else, our extended experience with microservices and the implementation of new front-end frameworks proved to be dealbreaker in Protel's decision to cooperate with us.

Serengeti's front-end scrum team, including the team lead and four developers, together with back-end team with four developers (focusing on specific microservices) were promptly onboard.

It was defined that Java monolith should converse to Java Spring microservices architecture. A scalable architecture was considered necessary for the next planned development phases. The user interface needed complete rewriting using Angular. User experience (UX) improvements and refreshments were also planned, as was the final deployment of the whole solution on AWS using AWS CI/CD.

With Protel's internal team guidance, Serengeti participated in the design and overall development of both background microservices (back-end) and application modules of the new platform (front-end).

The development of background microservices is based on Java 11 and the Spring Boot framework. Microservices are proxy REST APIs in a way that they represent the backbone between other (internal and external) services and platform as a "single source of truth". With the help of AWS, they are part of aggregated microservices system, functioning as a back-end support to the developed platform.

The development of the solution (front-end) application modules is done within the Angular 11+ development environment, with some additional technologies like Angular Material and Formly. Generally, for application and service development, Postman was an indispensable tool due to the variety of external services, which - in addition to the classic REST API - are often based on, for example, Elasticsearch or GraphQL.

Source code versioning and deployment are done by GIT and include the development phase with environmental separation (Dev, QA, Production, ...), so that each module and microservice gets a separate and fully functional development environment (within the AWS).