Hospitality industry has seen several generation shifts in technology over the past 20 or so years. Remember how a small company out of Germany with its young and innovative pc dos application managed to outpace the big mainframe technology providers? Remember how quickly the Windows era made the applications so much more user friendly and functionally diverse? What about now? What is going to be the industry's response to the new purchasing habits and behavioral trends of modern day travelers? Over 50% of hotel reservations are already made on the internet and most hotel guests are researching their trips and sharing their travel experiences online, on sites like tripit.com, Tripadvisor and Yahoo Travel.

In order to stay successful, hoteliers need technology that would allow them to interact much closer with their guests - prior, during and after their hotel stay. And since most of this interaction is taking place online, in the internet cloud, the internet provides the most logical platform for the next generation of guest-centric hotel technology solutions.

In hospitality, traditionally the most important software application has been the hotel's Property Management System or the PMS. We then saw the attention shift towards reservation and distribution management, such as Central Reservation Systems (CRS) and booking engines. It has always been about driving revenue and achieving operational efficiency. What we are seeing now is a change in focus to paying more attention to the guest, knowing about their lifestyle, anticipating their expectations, providing unique experiences and interacting with them on multiple levels. We are seeing CRM (customer relationship management) applications gaining more traction with hotel operators and becoming the center point of the overall guest relationship life cycle.

The web-based cloud platform for CRM applications allows for tight integration with the consumer booking engines, social web sites, travel portals and online messaging and communication technologies. This integration is done in real time and on a worldwide basis, bringing hotels closer to their customers and enabling direct communications without intermediaries.

The cloud platform also allows a high pace of innovation by smaller, industry-focused teams that can react to new trends and opportunities much quicker than the large mainstream vendors. Platform providers such as force.com take away the need for developers to worry about the foundation building blocks of their applications so that they can concentrate on implementing innovative ideas and bringing them to the market quickly and securely. The open nature of the web and common integration standards such as those led by HTNG make it possible for these new innovative solutions to work together.

Ultimately what we are seeing is the emergence of an ecosystem of innovation, by tapping which hoteliers will become more agile and responsive to the web-inspired expectations of the modern hotel guest.