Bottomline 2010 Top Ten

To start off the new decade, the HITEC 2010 Advisory Council has identified the top technology issues of interest in our industry. These are the topics will have the biggest impact on our business. What follows is a series of writings by experienced, industry experts discussing their perspectives on these trends. The authors were asked to consider: What makes this issue a top hospitalitytechnology trend in 2010, and what are the short- and long-term implications for hospitality firms? And what should any hospitality manager keep in mind to stay on top of this trend?

Table of Contents

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By Phil LaBelle

Virtualization: A Smaller Technology Footprint

19 20


Business Intelligence: Start Practicing Proactive Management By Sherry Marek
By Nicos Papaioannou6 7 9 10


Cloud Computing: Goodbye Limitations, Hello Convergence By Mike Kennedy

Business Intelligence: Foundation to CRM Success Generational Diversity: The New Travelers Generational Diversity: Embrace the Generation Gap By Ian Millar, CHTP From Green to Sustainable: Environmental Revolution By Robert Allender

Cloud Computing: Partly Cloudy With a Chanceof 22 Savings By Lyle Worthington, CHTP System Integration: Have We Reached Plug-and-Play? By Jon Inge
By Jeremy Rock, CHTP

By Terence Ronson

24 26 28


Data Security: Preempting a Data Breach Online Behavior: Web Distribution Online Behavior: Web 2.0 Online Behavior: Social Media Guest-centric Service Models: Business on the Go

13


By Peter O’Connor, Ph.D.By Mark Glickman

From Green to Sustainable: Sustainable Buzz Mobile Connections: In Touch With The Mobile Set Mobile Connections: Don’t Drop Good Coverage Future-proofing the Guestroom: In-room Tech Infrastructure By Chuck Marratt Future-proofing the Guestroom: Prepping for New Trends By Ted Horner

14


By Cindy Estis Green

29


By Norm Rose

15


By DanConnolly, Ph.D.

30


By Darlene Braunschweig

17


By Dave Berkus

31 32

18

Business Intelligence: Tailor Marketing to Individual Guests By Randy Dearborn

2010 Top Technology Issues

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Virutalization

A SMALLER TECHNOLOGy FOOTPRINT
Make way for savings in hardware costs, rack space, power and data center cooling costs By Phil LaBelle

I

t’sdifficult to pick up a magazine these days without running across the word virtualization. We live in a virtual world and we deal with virtual realities. Vendors bombard us daily with ads telling us to virtualize our data centers to save money. But what does it all really mean? Is it worthy of our attention? If so, where do we start? This article will try to answer those very questions. By the time you’redone reading, hopefully you’ll have a much better appreciation for the concepts of virtualization. First, just what is virtualization? At its simplest level, virtualization allows us to carve up a single physical server and make it appear as if it were a rack of multiple independent servers or PCs. This paves the way for dramatic savings in hardware costs, rack space, power and data centercooling costs, among other things. In 1998, a company named VMware was founded, and in 2001 they introduced two products GSX Server and ESX Server that allowed customers to purchase a large server (physical server) and through the magic of a piece of software called a hypervisor, allow the operating system to interact with that single physical server as if it were multiple logical servers (or virtualservers.) Each logical/virtual server uses a portion of the overall processing power, memory capacity and storage capacity available to the overall physical server (see Figure 1, right). In this manner, an application could be installed in a particular virtual server (also known as a virtual machine, or VM) and that application would think it had an entire server dedicated to itself. It would...