[Enswitch-announce] RFI: Hotel PMS integration

[Alistair Cunningham]

Integrics is interested in adding hotel Property Management System (PMS) 
integration to Enswitch. This is at the request of multiple Enswitch 
customers who inform us that they are in a position to sell hosted 
telephony services to a large number of hotels in a variety of countries 
if PMS integration can be provided. Some of these customers are quite 
substantial, and highly experienced at selling telephony services in 
corporate environments.

We are therefore soliciting contact from companies who have existing 
products that allow integration with a variety of hotel PMSs. We will 
then select a suitable vendor, work with them to do the integration 
between Enswitch and their product, and then recommend their product to 
Enswitch customers.

Although Enswitch uses Asterisk for telephony, any PMS integration 
product will not have access to Asterisk machines or Asterisk CDRs. This 
is for a number of reasons, including:

1. The Enswitch architecture is completely unlike a standalone Asterisk 
system. For example, Enswitch has no handsets registered to the Asterisk 
machines in the cluster, nor is any customer configuration held in the 
Asterisk configuration files.

2. The Enswitch cluster may be running services for many other customers 
whose privacy must be ensured.

3. Some or all of the Asterisk machines in the cluster may be remote or 
behind a firewall.

4. The Asterisk CDRs are insufficient to record the full complexity of 
calls, especially with regard to billing. Enswitch's CDRs are 
considerably more complex than Asterisk's, and have a very different format.

The integration will need to be done through one or both of the 
following methods:

1. HTTP, SOAP, or other similar network connections from Enswitch to the 
PMS integration product. Integrics is willing to write the client side 
of this.

2. HTTP, SOAP, or other similar network connections from the PMS 
integration product to the web server machines in the Enswitch cluster. 
Enswitch already has an extensive SOAP API (details available on 
request), and Integrics is willing to make changes to this, or add new 
web server functions, if necessary.

It is desirable that a single Enswitch cluster can be integrated with 
multiple hotels as Enswitch systems can be very large with tens of 
thousands of customers and hundreds of thousands of users. Our customers 
would prefer not to have to install a separate Enswitch system for each 
hotel customer. Enswitch already supports the telephony and call rating 
side of this; it is desirable that any PMS integration product be 
capable of talking to multiple hotels.

The PMS integration product does not need to provide any telephony 
features, call rating, etc. Enswitch can provide all of these.

Interested parties are invited to email me directly.

-- 
Alistair Cunningham
+1 888 468 3111
+44 20 799 39 799
http://integrics.com/