Brad Hilton: No Reservations About Technology Passion

Software Magazine, June, 1999

He could have lived a life of luxury, travel, and leisure but, instead, he opted to work hard in IT. Brad Hilton, grandson of Conrad Hilton and son of Eric Hilton, former vice chairman of the Board of Hilton Hotels Corporation, got interested in technology early on.

"My father was always on the development side, building new hotels, bringing them online," says Hilton. "As I was growing up, I got interested in the hotel business based on what he was doing. I got interested in technology when I was in seventh grade around the time Apple II came out. My knack for technical things led to a hobby which led to my career."

When Hilton was 17, he joined Compass Computers, a Hilton subsidiary which maintains the company's reservation and other systems. Hilton left the luxury hotel chain to work at American Airlines for a brief stint and then returned to the family business.

Today, Hilton has 15 years of experience in the IT industry. His areas of expertise include network design, project planning, systems development, installation, and training. Hilton oversees the Hilton Hotels' new 700-user global hotel information system as well as the company's intranet and extranets. Hilton, whose official tide is manager of systems development, is constantly on the lookout for new technology that could improve programs and cut costs.

About one year ago, Hilton was asked to participate in the redesign of HIDB Web (Hilton Information Database), a central repository for all hotel information that feeds systems such as the Hilton reservation system. HIDB is rather large, with 144 forms in the application.

"When I got involved, I was told that I needed to become a Java programmer," says Hilton. "At that time, I had very little experience in programming. My main background was in networks, computer set-up, planning, and training. I was in the midst of building our corporate intranet as this project came along."

Though Hilton had no Java experience, he was put on the evaluation team to review various tools which, he says, he had a hard time getting from the vendors. Time was slipping by and Hilton decided to browse the Internet and take a look around for himself. When he came across Vision Jade, he says, he was impressed reading that this tool would write 95% of the code for him.

"Since I had no Java experience, I thought this would be great," says Hilton. "I downloaded the product and was able to create a prototype of HIDB Web in about two days. When I gave my presentation, my program turned out to be more functional, better looking, and faster than the one developed by a consulting firm we had hired for $50,000."

Vision Jade from Vision Software, Oakland, Calif., is a business automation platform with an intuitive business rules approach to reduce development and deployment costs. Hilton's demo convinced the Hilton evaluation team to use Vision Jade for re-architecting HIDB Web from a client/server model to a Java-based intranet application. This application has been rolled out over the last five months and currently supports about 250 users. Hilton says he hopes to bring all of Hilton's international properties online by the end of this year, serving 1,000 users or more.

"The system collects information from hotel amenities to facilities to lost or stolen credit cards to rates for particular groups," says Hilton. "We use this information to feed our www.hilton.com site and our central reservation system. Our goal is to maintain consistency in the information we're giving to our customers."

As a manager of systems development, Hilton says some of the most important issues to him are time to market and less dependency on outsourcing. "HIDB Web was an outsourced application, and we were going to outsource it again to have it rewritten," he explains. "When I found Vision Jade, we decided to bring it in-house."

Among personal goals, Hilton says, is staying informed about new technologies. "When I catch on to something, I dive in and give it a good run-through to see if it will fit in our environment. I want to provide Hilton with the latest technology to help cut costs as well as control our destiny as far as not having to outsource things. I guess my personal goals and business goals are kind of intertwined."

What's Hilton's biggest challenge? "Time, there is not enough of it," he says.