I have been a proud member of the HTNG board for over 5 years now and have seen HTNG grow in my home base; Dubai and the region. HTNG (Hotel Technology Next Generation) is the largest not for profit trade organization for technology in the hospitality industry and a great platform for hoteliers and vendors to work together on enhancing the technology we deploy in hotels.

HTNG holds four conferences a year and this was the second edition of the Middle East conference with more than twice as many attendees as the previous one, two years ago. It was especially nice to see that hoteliers and owners representatives from non IT departments also attended the conference. It is HTNG's aim to provide solutions to business problems using technology and it was therefore great to see the momentum HTNG has gained in non IT functions.

The conference was jam packed with sessions about IT trends such as cloud, mobility, security and big data as you would expect in a 2013 IT conference. Remarkable was the increased attention given to the business applications of those trends and in particular how marketing and operations are being affected.

Michael Kogeler, the Chief Marketing Officer of Microsoft for the Middle East and Africa opened the conference with a keynote about cloud and how it is affecting the industry and the region. He made the point that IT services are becoming more like electricity and that hotel companies and vendors are still playing catch up in this area.

Patrick Deroy, the Hospitality Solutions Director for Ruckus Wireless spoke about the increased demands on the hotel WIFI systems. With devices getting smaller less space is allocated for antennas and batteries and the result is that access points need to become more powerful. He also spoke about the move from the very crowded 2.4 Ghz range into the 5 Ghz range and the upcoming Hotspot 2.0 that will support GSM style WIFI roaming. Something to look forward to or to worry about?

Many of the sessions addressed the cross roads between marketing and IT. A real highlight was the panel of Sales and Marketing professionals talking about their expectations from IT. With CRM, Distribution, Social and Digital at the heart of every hotel company nowadays the collaboration between marketing and IT is becoming more and more critical. Did you know that 60% of conversations on Facebook are travel related and that customers have more faith in third party reviews then the content that we offer on our brand web sites? The panel was united in the opinion that more and more IT responsibilities will be moved to Marketing departments. Akvile Pareigyte, Founder of Tsweaq discussed the online channels and how IT can help to optimize it and Alana Witte from Revinate spoke about the tools that we can use to measure our customer satisfaction using online sentiment monitoring.

I was personally happy to see that the largest telecom in the region Etisalat has committed to a strategy for hospitality and announced the offering of burstable Internet for hotels on a utility based pricing model. This will really help hotels to offer a better service to guests while maintaining a reasonable cost base. With more customers BYOE-ing (bring your own everything…), bandwidth becomes one of the key drivers for customer satisfaction and it's great to see that companies like Etisalat help their enterprise customers leverage this.

My friend and executive coach Colin Abercrombie did a very interactive session on 'how to get yourself noticed'. IT leaders in our industry are often very good at their jobs but not very good at promoting their successes. Colin's message to us was to get out there and be our own Publicist.

Henri Schomper, Director Customer Security and Risk Services, MasterCard spoke about PCI and other security issues in our industry. One of the statistics that stood out was the fact that 85% of breaches take place in the retail and hospitality industry. This made me wonder if we are investing enough in our security.

In good HTNG tradition the last session was a panel of IT leaders. It was not surprising to hear that the IT leaders were of the opinion that more and more marketing responsibilities are shifting to IT and not the other way around…

We had a great 2 days and I look forward to seeing everyone again on the European HTNG conference on November 12 to 14 in London, which will be an equally interesting conference.