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In the Beginning
In 1947, architect Roy Kelley designed and built a 50-room hotel called the Islander in Waikiki. Rooms cost $7 a night. Over the years Kelley and his wife Estelle built the company into Outrigger Hotels, the largest lodging business in the state. Yet Kelley worked from a desk in the lobby of one hotel and could be seen helping guests load their bags into the elevator.
Once the elder Kelley saw his son and successor, Richard Kelley, talking to an IBM salesman in one of the company's hotels and sent him a note: No computers.
"Fortunately," says Carey, "Rich didn't listen."
Carey, who has an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering, joined the company as an attorney, married a Kelley and became CEO in 1994. Over the years Outrigger has moved into resort management and expanded into Australia, New Zealand and countries across the Pacific.
Carey hired consultant Joe Durocher to write a central reservation system (CRS) named Stellex (after the founder's wife). Durocher became the company's first CIO. To help overhaul Outrigger's IT systems, he called his friend Alan White to fly over as a consultant.
White had stumbled into the hotel industry after he found it hard to make a living with a graduate degree in international affairs. He took a job as a night manager at a Sheraton. "I needed to pay the rent," he says. "I thought it was a wonderful business. I was introduced to technology by hotels. I got into software out of a frustration from not getting stuff done."
White moved up through the industry and wound up running the hospitality operations at a golf resort in North Carolina, where he helped develop a system to manage reservations and tee times. That led to a series of jobs at hospitality software vendors, including Pegasus Solutions in Dallas. White and Durocher had worked together on the Open Travel Alliance, an industry standards group.
After cashing out from his last job, White was looking to buy and run his own boutique hotel in Arizona when he got a call from Outrigger. White went to Hawaii, first as a consultant, and before long he became vice president of operations and IT. "I was going to buy a hotel," White says. "Then Joe said, 'I got a problem.' Six years later, I'm still here."
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