Choice Hotels International’s early and big bet on the cloud has allowed it to glean the many benefits of its digital transformation and devote more energies to a key corporate value — sustainability, its CIO maintains.

That is largely due to the 80-year-old hotel chain’s tight partnership with Amazon Web Services, says Choice CIO Brian Kirkland, who claims his company is enjoying the cost benefits and energy efficiencies of the cloud while exploiting many of 225 related services AWS offers such as analytics and AI to keep advancing on its digital reservations and pricing platform.

Kirkland, a founding member of SustainableIT.org, an organization to drive global sustainability through technology leadership, says Choice was the first hospitality company to make a strategic commitment to developing a cloud-native and sustainable platform on AWS.

The cloud platform helped Choice pivot quickly during the pandemic, enabling it to scale on demand as hotel traffic went down. It also helped reduce energy consumption and costs. More importantly, perhaps, pushing all in on the cloud has freed up Choice to be not just a hospitality company and franchisor, but to Kirkland’s considerable pride, a technology company as well, he says.

“I’m not in the business of managing infrastructure,” says Kirkland, whose previous stints at GoDaddy and Intel helped build the technology acumen he parlays in a new type of industry he joined in 2015. “I am in the business of hospitality. Our goal is to deliver business value for our franchisees and our guests by leveraging AWS.”

Read the full article at Choice Hotels International, Inc.