Hospitality Upgrade reached out to the team at DANNI Enterprises to provide a summary of experiences from HITEC 2016. Each team member scouted HITEC through the lens of his or her specific area of expertise.
Terry Price, Areas of expertise: accounting, financial systems and back-of-house technologies
#HITECnola Part 2:
This year’s HITEC show was very exciting. With a record number of attendees, the floor was abuzz with energy. Talking with several vendors, they were all pleased and excited with the quality of the attendees and their interest in the solutions.
As you walked the exhibit floor, you are blown away with visual stimulus. The booths seemed to be bigger and taller than ever. The TV displays were bigger, curved and so clear that you noticed the pores of a frog. I’m glad there were no 4K pictures of me showing.
The in-room entertainment space is getting very exciting with the amount of content and integration you can use to communicate with guests and allow them to control their experience, even showing their own content from their personal devices. The entertainment even expanded to a virtual reality experience. Not exactly sure why you would want to “virtually” experience a hotel, but…
My focus for HITEC was around operation systems. Working with the boring back office systems does not exactly translate into an exciting HITEC experience. There were several vendors that offered their solutions in the cloud. But, when you click the “check-in” button, there is no lightning or thunder because it is going up in the cloud. Cloud, in my opinion, is just an infrastructure decision that a company needs to make. However, the complex operations will still have a difficult time to move their operation solutions into the cloud just yet. It will get there, but it will take some time.
For me, the most exciting thing in the operational space is the integration bus, a leading candidate in this space is IrekonU. This new technology allows all the different solutions to communicate with each other without the direct company to company interface process. A system sends all of its information up to the integration bus, then all the other systems listen to the communication flowing on the bus and grabs the information it needs. This allows a property to change any part of their operation solutions and not have to even notify any other systems of the change.
I felt this year’s trip to HITEC was very successful and I am very excited about where our industry is going. I feel honored to be able to be part of the trip.
This special report is part of a 6-part HITEC 2016 summary focusing on specific technology areas from this year’s event. The remaining 4 parts will be released in the July 8, 2016 Siegel Sez on Hotel Online and will include summaries about network security, infrastructure, payment security, cloud and telecom.