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Migrating data to the cloud can be a quick win

There seems to be consensus in the hotel industry that technology should be migrating toward cloud-hosted platforms, rather than on-premise systems built in-house. But many properties find out very quickly what a slow, arduous process that is.

The problem gets even harder when all the industry’s companies evolve at different paces, leaving a messy hotel technology ecosystem half in the cloud, with hundreds of vendors and brands unable to interface with one another.

It’s not that surprising that hospitality has this challenge. As with any other industry that is well entrenched as a major chunk of the economy — think financial services, health care or government — there is a lot of code out there. Software rarely goes away, so all that code is still running somewhere. Too often, it is running on legacy hardware built decades ago on premise.

It is tempting to forklift every piece of technology at the property level “to the cloud,” but don’t rush the process as not every hotel is ready for such a big investment. A quick win could be had by moving just data, rather than mission-critical systems, off premise.

Consider the benefits hotels might gain. A cloud-hosted system for storing reservation or transaction data could centralize it where the PMS, CRS and other systems can update it in real time. Other tech vendors could call upon that data in the same place to use in different applications or software programs.

Migrating just hotel data could be important for unleashing innovation in the industry. For major hotel brands in particular, using a cloud-based warehouse for data storage would enable them to adopt applications on the infrastructure side. This would streamline operations, even if the properties are not ready to switch out an on-premise PMS or other system.

Even if that doesn’t translate into less on-premise hardware for the property in the immediate term, it lays the groundwork for being able to decommission costly data servers — and, eventually, other inflexible systems that will struggle to keep up.

The first thing hotels should accept is that a change this monumental can’t happen quickly.

Hoteliers will have to insist on and push for interoperability among their different systems, whether those are on-premise or already hosted in the cloud. Often that will be with partners. But this won’t entail merely outsourcing part of the hotel’s IT to vendors; it will require demanding that they do the hard work of expanding integrations.

It will be a long slog, but it will be worth it.  An inflection point will come, not necessarily when every hotel has every piece of its tech stack in the cloud, but rather when a majority of hotels’ systems can at least integrate with one another and use the same data.

 


Contributed by Patrick Bosworth, Duetto, San Francisco

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