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Ben Clifford, co-founder and CTO, Nevaya, looks back over his journey to embracing the one true cloud.
‘I was born in a hotel, my grandparents started a hotel in 1960 after putting people up on their farm during the Bath & West show, the Airbnb story. I started helping out as a child, recycling the bottles from being the bar when I was 10, “which clearly wasn’t going to pay as well as a role in tech”, before getting into tech. From around 13 I was working on the PMS and PoS systems and when I was 16 my grandparents bought me a computer in return for running their IT system.
‘When I went to university I wrote an Expedia-type OTA before Expedia as my university dissertation and James [Richmond, Nevaya co-founder & CEO] and I got 60 or 70 properties on it.
‘At that time guests were starting to demand wifi in their rooms and we thought this looked a likely market. We didn’t realise that people were buying in solutions from Cisco, I just wrote one in my bedroom. We built the hardware, we installed it, then we looked after the whole system, almost by accident.
‘It wasn’t until 2008 that a company called Exterity asked us to come up with a way to sell their TV solution over IP. By this point the WiFi network had grown to be the biggest network in the hotel because people wanted it everywhere. Before it was just computers on the front desk and a printer that went off every time someone was watching porn on the TV. Now it was everywhere, so it was a good idea to use it for TV. After about a year or two of this we started making the hardware ourselves as well, because there was nothing decent out there.
‘We didn’t get into the cloud until we won a contract to put WiFi in across the Waterstones network. It’s one thing to put a £2,000 server in a hotel with 200 rooms, but a bookstore can’t afford that. We had to find a way to scale it and that was the cloud.
‘In our industry, people don’t really embrace cloud. They make a lot of noise about it, but they haven’t got a clue. They see it more as being able to access a website from anywhere, we see it as a way to achieve infinite scaleability.
‘We design for things to fail, rather than try and stop them failing. To paraphrase Bill Baker, when we create something, we think of it as cattle, rather than a pet. What do I mean by this? Well, back in the day, we’d get have a server in the Comms Room and someone dusts its little vents and backs it up every night and if it failed, it was as if the world had ended. So it was a pet. If it dies, we’ll be sad. We’ll miss Fido. But we deal with cattle, we design for it to fail.
‘So rather than have one expensive thing with its redundancy and power supplies and all those nice things in the rack, I’m going to throw five cheap ones in there. And those five cost less than that one big one: if one breaks, it doesn’t matter because the others work. I don’t want to care about it, it hasn’t got a name, it’s got a number. And this is the idea of cattle.
‘And when I say design to fail, it’s important to design a system where you have, for example, guest information in multiple places, so you don’t need to worry if it breaks in one place, you’re covered.
‘You can also move things around and take advantage of economies of scale. Servers in Ireland might be 50% of the price of London and if you move everything there for the night, you save 50%. We have automated that and it’s about a 70% saving. For me, that is the true cloud and its true benefit.
‘And while it might be hard to set up the system from scratch, once you have done, there are significant benefits. We run updates every night, because it’s free to us and because we can.
‘And of course there are people muddying the waters, saying that if you can log into websites from anywhere, that’s the cloud, but those things break. But for it, it’s the reason why, for example, casting onto the TV is bulletproof and why we can scale around the world. The one true cloud has taken us, it’s given us the ability to be agile and respond quickly.
‘We want others to be agile, which is one of the reasons why we publish our APIs to partners and let them do what the like with them. We want to be a good partner and be open to it. And people stay because we’re good, not because we’re locking them in.
‘I would like to see this drive personalisation at scale. At the moment too many vendors are trying to hold onto their silos, but what we need to move towards is to stop caring about who owns hotel data and facilitate it. At the moment there is too much focus on asking the question first – like what is the guest’s favourite type of wine – then collecting the data. It should be data first, then using those learnings.’