What Choice Hotels Gained by Choosing Perforce Delphix
- 90% faster database refreshes, reducing a two-week process to less than a day
- Significant cost savings by minimizing database storage requirements
- Improved software quality through consistent, repeatable testing
- Enhanced data security with robust masking technology to protect sensitive guest information
Choice Hotels' results are just one example of why companies choose Delphix for test data management.
Choice Hotels' Story, At-a-Glance
Overview
Faced with the challenges of managing complex data environments and ensuring robust data security, Choice Hotels, a leader in hospitality innovation, sought a solution to accelerate development cycles while safeguarding sensitive guest information. By leveraging Delphix’s data automation, virtualization, and masking platform, Choice Hotels transformed its development and testing processes. The results: faster development cycles, reduced costs, and enhanced data security across all environments.
The Challenge: Expensive Database Copies, Slow Processes
As a pioneer in hospitality technology, Choice Hotels has a long history of innovation, from being the first major hotel chain to implement a cloud-based property management system to modernizing its central reservation system. However, managing development and testing environments presented significant challenges:
- Developer Bottlenecks: With hundreds of developers working on shared systems, overlapping changes often caused disruptions, leading to inefficiencies and delays.
- Costly Data Management: Maintaining multiple copies of the same database across environments consumed significant resources.
- Time-Consuming Processes: Restoring databases for testing could take hours, days, or even weeks, slowing down development cycles.
- Data Security Risks: Ensuring sensitive guest data, such as PII and PCI information, was protected in non-production environments added complexity and compliance risks.
These challenges hindered the ability to deliver high-quality software quickly and securely, impacting both operational efficiency and guest satisfaction.
The Solution: Instant, Self-Service Data Access
To address these challenges, Choice Hotels adopted Delphix’s platform for data automation, virtualization, and masking. This transformative solution enabled the team to:
- Virtualize Databases: By virtualizing databases, Choice Hotels drastically reduced the time required to refresh environments. Tasks that previously took weeks now take minutes or hours, allowing teams to iterate and test more frequently.
- Streamline Testing: Automated database snapshots and rollbacks enabled consistent, repeatable testing for load, regression, and other automated test scenarios.
- Enhance Developer Productivity: Developers gained the ability to quickly refresh and reuse databases, accelerating application development and reducing bottlenecks.
- Implement Robust Data Masking: Delphix’s masking technology ensured sensitive guest data was protected across all environments, safeguarding PII and PCI data while maintaining compliance.
The Results: Environments Provisioned in Mere Hours
The adoption of Delphix’s platform delivered transformative results for Choice Hotels:
- Faster Development Cycles: Recreating QA environments, which previously took two weeks, now takes less than a day, enabling quicker iterations and faster releases.
- Cost Optimization: Virtualization reduced database storage requirements, significantly lowering costs.
- Improved Security: Masking technology ensured sensitive data was protected, even in lower environments, reducing the risk of data breaches.
- Higher Software Quality: Teams could test with fresher, more accurate data, leading to better software and guest experiences.
Looking Ahead
For Choice Hotels, the integration of Delphix’s platform represents more than just operational efficiency — it’s a commitment to innovation, agility, and guest trust. By modernizing data workflows, Choice Hotels has built a foundation for faster development, stronger security, and a future-ready approach to hospitality technology.
By automating data delivery and masking, Choice Hotels removed data bottlenecks that slowed innovation and increased costs. Delphix helps enterprises do the same by unifying data delivery, governance, and compliance in one secure platform. See how Delphix helps teams innovate faster with trusted data.
Get a Custom Demo for Fast, Compliant Data
Full Video Transcript
At Choice, we have a long history of innovation. We were the first major hotel chain to implement a cloud‑based property management system, the first to release an iPhone application, and the first to modernize and move our central reservation system to the cloud.
We have hundreds of developers working on projects, all leveraging the same core systems to make changes. In our development and test environments, that often meant developers stepping on each other’s toes—introducing code changes that impacted other teams. As a result, we ended up with many duplicate copies of the same database across our environment, which was costly and inefficient.
If someone needed to use a database, they had to take a backup and then restore it—a process that could take hours or even days just to get back to a state where testing could resume. When we evaluated Delphix, the key benefit was the ability to virtualize databases. Tasks that used to take days—or even weeks, depending on the number of backups—now take minutes or hours. Teams can refresh data and repeat their work quickly and consistently.
Delphix allows us to truly virtualize our environments and support faster development cycles through snapshotting and rapid refreshes. It has helped us move faster in development while significantly reducing the amount of database storage we consume, optimizing both space and cost across our environments.
One major use case is automated testing. Whether we’re running load tests, refactoring tests, or repeating regression tests, we use Delphix to roll databases back, replay them, and run tests again and again until we’re confident everything is working as expected. Software developers also use Delphix directly when building applications.
By changing how we operate in these environments and leveraging technologies like Delphix, we can react much more quickly. For example, recreating a QA data environment used to take two weeks of effort; now we can do it in less than a day. That’s a huge win for us.
One of the most important aspects of Delphix for me is the masking technology. Our top priority is protecting data—making sure it’s secure and preventing mistakes. We must do the right thing when it comes to safeguarding PII and PCI data and ensuring our environments remain clean and compliant.
We use masking to protect lower‑level environments across all of our applications. You can’t always control what a call center agent or customer enters into a text field—someone might accidentally input a credit card number, for example. Without a technology like Delphix, that data could persist in non‑production environments. Delphix helps us detect, mask, and protect sensitive data so it stays secure.
Ultimately, it comes down to protecting our guests’ data first and foremost—ensuring it’s handled safely and correctly. At the same time, Delphix gives us the ability to pivot quickly and use data in meaningful ways that minimize costs, optimize our environment, and help us respond faster to change.
Similar Case Studies
- Mattel reduced data refresh time from 5 days to 4-8 hours with Delphix.
- Natura & Co reduced time to provision and refresh data from 48 hours to less than 1 hour.
- Proximus reduced time to mask data from 2 weeks to less than 18 hours.
Ready to make data fast, trusted, and AI-ready? Explore what Delphix can do for your business.