HITEC 2001 Interviews - Microsoft Corporation - Mr. Gary Cooke - Industry Manager for Hospitality & Food Service
Hospitality & Food Service is a large, diverse, global market comprising well over 600,000 individual hotel and restaurant sites in North America alone; inclusion of international sites could double this number. Each site deploys different kinds and mixes of technology to serve customers and perform its business operations, making this industry a complex technology environment. As hotels and, to some degree, restaurants come to be booked as part of a larger "travel experience," the ability of everybody's systems to interoperate becomes more important, and the need for security intensifies.