The hospitality industry's benefit in moving to cloud outweighs challenges manifolds

What are the recent developments in the hospitality space in the

area of cloud services?

During the last few years, the hospitality space has seen a major upsurge in usage and reliance on cloud based services for their marketing,

reservations, customer delight , and a whole range of other internal

productivity applications converge upon cloud based infrastructure

management. With the advent of Big data analytics in the cloud ecosystem, the whole apart from being a scalable hosting environment, offers a number of opportunities such as analytics, predictive market analysis, and insights into customer behavior.

What is the value proposition for Cloud in the hospitality space?

Cloud based services enable the hospitality business owners to streamline

their infrastructure costs with the usage, thus leading to better customer

satisfaction in a cost effective manner with a pay-as-you-go service model.

Additionally, the use of cloud based services removes the need for the

business owners to manage the day to day infrastructural requirements like

equipment maintenance, security management, software upgrades etc.

Thus, by shifting from an in-house CAPEX model for infrastructure, and letting the cloud service provider to manage those aspects, hospitality companies are now able to focus more on their core service offerings that are meant to improve end customer retention and experience. Also, with smartphones becoming commonplace, cloud based services provide the business owners with a global reach to potential customers.

How far is the development in terms of adoption? What are the major challenges?

Cloud based services are being widely adopted in the hospitality space, with

companies like Kempinski and IHG already looking at a full switch from

server based enterprise setups to cloud services. With out-of-the-box cloud

based solutions for hospitality management, even smaller enterprises can

easily switch to cloud without any re-development cost for their software

infrastructure.

The major challenges that large enterprises are facing are:

* Shifting from legacy architecture typical to the older in-house

solutions, to the recent state-of-the-art architecture which is essential to

reap the benefits of cloud based services to the fullest.

* Data migration of the existing data to the new cloud based

systems.

However, these challenges do not pose a major deterrent to switching to cloud, as the relative advantages to be gained from moving to a cloud based system outweigh the challenges and the initial investments manifolds.

What will be the right strategy for cloud implementation in the hospitality space, both for clients and service providers?

For the clients, it is crucial to be able to move to the cloud

implementation quickly and seamlessly. The service providers can facilitate

this by building cloud platforms specific to the needs of the hospitality

space, with the ability to customize and extend to specific client needs.

Which are the most promising markets globally ?

Travel and Tourism Industry has shown a significant growth in the past

decade or so and has been by far the biggest growth driver for the

hospitality Industry. This growth has been more or less compounded with the spawning up of a number of high quality portals, such as Expedia's and Trip advisors of the world at one end, and exclusive portals of hotels, travel

operators and hospitality agencies at the other end. Clocking millions of

hits and a vast growing segment the users relying exclusively upon such

portals for online reviews, reservations etc, the behind the scene cloud

component is a given.

In addition, Cloud based Big data Analytics tools and the whole ecosystem around them, are playing major role as Businesses and Hospitality industry players are relying upon them to generate and gain insights into travel patterns, likes/dislikes, reviews and innumerable other potential growth opportunities.

Is there is a significant growth happening in the domestic hospitality market?

With more and more big and small players in the hospitality space moving to cloud, the growth in the domestic market is significant. Several of the

Hospitality Management business owners have shown a desire to move their software infrastructure fully to cloud by 2015.