IDeaS Chief Evangelist Klaus Kohlmayr on joining HTNG’s Vendor Consulting Council.
This month marks my first attendance as a member of the Vendor Consulting Council for Hospitality Technology Next Generation (HTNG). I am excited to join a number of recognized industry experts and thought leaders to represent the hotel technology community and provide guidance to HTNG’s Board of Governors.
As the premier technology solutions association in the hospitality industry, HTNG is a self-funded, nonprofit organization with members from hospitality companies, technology vendors, consultants, media and academic experts. HTNG’s members participate in focused workgroups to bring to market open solution sets addressing specific business problems.
HTNG fosters the selection and adoption of existing open standards and also develops new open standards to meet the needs of the global industry. Currently more than 400 corporate and individual members from across this spectrum, including world-leading hospitality companies and technology vendors, are active HTNG participants.
Efficiently exchanging data is key to our industry. Hotels typically use 20 to 30 different systems. Without tight integrations between them, running a hotel profitably would be extremely difficult. HTNG has been around for many years and is credited with creating and maintaining critical data exchange standards vendors rely upon to integrate their systems. IDeaS has always been a key contributor, helping develop integration standards for revenue management and pricing purposes.
Of course, with new and more open ways to connect different systems, HTNG needs to continuously refresh any standards which might be perceived as outdated or outmoded. In an industry as defragmented as hospitality, this is especially critical. If the industry didn’t have a set of standards to refer to, just negotiating what integration protocol to adopt between vendors would take up a huge amount of time and effort.
I am excited to contribute to the Vendor Consulting Council for three key reasons:
- I look forward to engaging with the broader vendor community and representing their needs as we influence the direction of HTNG.
- From my continuous dialogue with the industry, I am constantly interacting with start-ups, hotel brands and related companies. The themes resulting from those conversations will allow me to directly bring that knowledge back to the consulting council for future projects.
- My consulting council peers represent some of the largest (Oracle, NEC) companies as well as the most innovative start-ups (HAPI, Cloud 5). Being able to interact on a regular basis with these companies and discuss what’s next for hospitality technology will help broaden my view on the future of the industry.
- On Discovery, On Distribution, On Data & Analytics – with Kalibri Labs - December 10, 2020
- Unconstrained Conversations – An IDeaS Podcast - April 16, 2020
- Welcome to the Future - January 23, 2020
