Hotel Yearbook Article The Hotel Yearbook Technology 2023

Giving legacy systems a new life with two-way middleware new tech integrations

Integrating new technology into legacy systems is a challenge in the hospitality industry. Middleware solutions offer opportunities to revitalize these systems and enable seamless customer experiences by bridging old and new systems. Real-time data access and integration of operational data using AI and machine learning enhance operational efficiency and drive loyalty.

Jan Jaap van Roon

In the hospitality industry, we must constantly add new layers of functionality to our existing systems to keep up with technological development and market trends. Integrating new tech in legacy systems is a particular challenge where those legacy systems were not built with multiple integrations in mind. Legacy systems are a huge investment and when integrating new tech, we have to protect that investment in a stable environment while adding new technology, sometimes even experimenting, to leverage that investment and increase ROI by creating new opportunities. To ignore the challenges is not an option – no integration means no future and the future is offering seamless experiences to your customers.

Where there are challenges, there are also opportunities so what I would like to do is shift the conversation away from simply effective, low-risk, low-cost integration to giving legacy systems a new life by employing middleware solutions that enable two-way communications among all systems, old and new. This achieves the optimal result by creating a single source of truth and Golden Profiles that normalise and clean data that then then become what I call ‘actionable’. If you really want to benefit from integrating new tech in legacy systems, you need two-way synchronization with good data, and this is done with middleware that has the capability to add new flows that previously did not exist.

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The Hotel Yearbook Technology 2023

The 2024 edition of "The Hotel Yearbook (HYB) Technology," curated by EHL's Ian Millar, offers a comprehensive outlook on the emerging technology trends and innovations poised to shape the global hotel industry. It amalgamates insights from a multitude of industry thought leaders, spotlighting key foresight in several tech-oriented fields. This includes anticipated evolutions in the future tech stack, which will drive operational efficiencies, the 'human stack' that explores the intersection of human resources and technology, and the application of Generative AI in creating novel customer experiences. Overall, this HYB edition serves as an essential guide for understanding how technology and innovation will redefine the industry landscape.

With his vision that IT should be the enabler and not the bottleneck, Jan Jaap van Roon started Ireckonu in 2014 to create quality and innovative software.

Founded in 2014, Ireckonu is a Dutch company committed to empowering the hospitality industry by putting guests at the center of new digital foundations. With over 60 employees globally, the company provides SaaS products and services to some of the world's leading hotel brands.