Case Study: NEW KENILWORTH HOTEL PRIVATE LTD

Background: Kenilworth Hotels & Resorts story began in 1969, when their late founder and chairman, Mr. M.S. Bharat, a freedom fighter turned businessman acquired the lease for a 35 key guest house in the bustling metropolis of Kolkata.

Determined to make a mark in the hospitality industry, his hard work and perseverance eventually led to the buy-out of the guest house from the original owners. With the support of his son, Mr. Raju Bharat (2nd generation hotelier and current Chairman & Managing Director of the company) converted the guest house into what is today known as their flagship property, i.e., Kenilworth Hotel, Kolkata – A 101 key four-star hotel spread across 1.5 acres in the heart of .

Continuing the legacy, Mr. Raju Bharat spearheaded the brand's expansion into other destinations within India. In 1998, he acquired a defunct brownfield property with direct access to the beach in the sunny and tranquil state of Goa. With its own set of challenges, the full-scale restoration of the property took 2 years to complete and finally on 24th December 2000, Kenilworth Resort & Spa – A 101 key five-star resort spread across 14 acres in South Goa opened its door to customers.

Challenges: Previously, they were using C-panel/Webmail for around 200 users for several years. Additionally, there was a local exchange server which used to route emails to a certain set of users who used to access them offline and there were delays in email delivery, resulting in making email usage complex in nature. There were downtime and spam-related issues from time to time. This was happening for around 3-4 years due to which there were serious business implications. Moreover, real-time collaboration & communication among users in Kolkata & Goa was also a challenge. Another challenge was to maintain the local/on-prem exchange server. A lot of time was invested in ensuring the smooth running of the server and repairing it whenever there would be any glitch. The IT team or IT Manager was overburdened with managing two solutions - Webmail & local exchange server simultaneously and found it difficult to monitor the user-activity in both the solutions separately.

Consequently, they had to make a choice whether to continue with WebMail & local exchange software or to move on to a different solution which can solve all their issues, at the same time being economical. Group organizations often face crossroads like this, which is where organizations like Infiflex Technologies can step in to help plan migrations from webmail to the cloud.

Solution: Infiflex came into the picture when Kenilworth’s IT team was struggling with their problem of existing mailing solutions. Our solutions team proposed Google Workspace as a cloud-based business mailing solution. Guaranteed uptime and 30Gb pooled storage per user helped the Kenilworth’s users to exchange emails effortlessly and avoid unnecessary delays in mail exchange. Gmail interface in comparison to other solutions is way more user-friendly as they were using the simple format from earlier, which prevented them from opting out other parallel solutions. Real-time collaboration & communication became seamless and easier than before.

​Also, from Google Workspace Admin console, the admin user can set-up different compliances, strengthen security and effectively secure Company data, all at one centralized place. As a package, Google provides collaborative tools in Google Workspace which solved their issue of spending extra on other random tools, which are available in the market.

Benefits: Google makes an identified mark when it comes to technology and innovations. Therefore, shifting to Google Workspace from Webmail automatically benefited the users of Kenilworth Hotels. From the Admin Console of GWS, the Admin could set compliance to increase security over organizational data, user-friendly interface, Single Sign-On facility over Collaborative tools (Drive and Docs) that helped in user satisfaction. Moreover, GWS’s reliability and functionality lessened the workload as the Customer found the solution easily manageable and little to no support issues.

Conclusion: Google Workspace turned out to be the complete economical solution providing maximum benefits for Kenilworth Hotels regardless of the challenges they have faced over time.