| | 19TRAVEL AND HOSPITALITY TECH OUTLOOKDEC-JAN 2024ELEVATING HOSPITALITY TO THE CLOUDBy Dr. Peter Agel, Global Segment Leader Hotels, OracleConverting to dynamic, centralized, pay-as-you-go computing is helping hoteliers improve profitability, lower cost, and meet skyrocketing consumer expectations.Like every consumer-facing business today, the hospitality industry is confronted with unprecedented--and ever-increasing--expectations on the part of its customers. To stand out from the competition, hoteliers at every price point are striving to provide a smoother, friendlier, and more personalized guest experience.In order to do that successfully, an organization needs to identify, adopt, and integrate new technological capabilities as soon as they become available. Otherwise, each new development becomes a negative differentiator--something you can't do but the other guy can.Ideally, the office of the CIO should be the leader of this process of ongoing innovation. Assuming this role has been a challenge for CIOs in the hospitality industry, however, because of the fragmented nature of the industry's approach to IT. Typically, each individual site has an IT staff running its own servers, doing its own maintenance, upgrading its own software, and collecting its own data.And even in companies who have a centralized system, hotel staff can and do bypass it in the interest of, say, getting a guest checked in quickly. If there is no record of a certain guest in the hotel's own database, rather than take the time to check with the central data repository, a busy desk clerk may simply create a new record on the spot.In such an environment, it is extremely difficult to upgrade system capabilities without adding a lot of bolted-on point solutions, which in turn makes the system even more difficult to maintain and scale up.Cloud technology offers hospitality industry CIOs, an opportunity to leapfrog over these structural difficulties by moving, CXO INSIGHTS
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