When programmer and analyst Chuck Haaker thinks back on the 40 years he’s programmed hospitality software, he can feel how much the process has changed. “When I got into the business back in the 70s, it was very much paper-oriented,” he remembers. “We maxed-out our mainframe. We had two machines coupled together because we needed the horsepower.”
Back then, he says, “programmers had to watch what they did, had to be very meticulous in writing a program, because any one little instruction coded the wrong way could affect the performance of the system.” That experience gave Chuck a level of technical expertise that many programmers today don’t have.
“We leapfrogged that into the Intel processor era, where we had additional horsepower, and every year we’re making advances in that,” Chuck explains. “Anyone today feels they can put a website together, so the whole business has to be very reactionary, to everything in the corporate environment and to the consumer environment.”
To keep pace with the market and ahead of consumer expectation, businesses have to adapt their entire development model. “We used to have to write our own products,” Chuck says, reflecting on the days before Intel, when bandwidth was limited. Now, Chuck has to be adept not only at generation, but also at integration—a central tenant to the development philosophy for SkyTouch, which allows hotel chains and independents to easily transition from outdated property management systems to an advanced and dynamic cloud-based solution.
Because of its expandable bandwidth, the cloud is perfectly suited for integration based on a hotel’s specific needs. “Our system can integrate with other third parties—SiteMinder, Pegasus,” explains one SkyTouch developer. The SkyTouch focus on partnering with and smoothly integrating applications that hotels already use is allowing their hotel OS to help hotels transition quickly to the modern marketplace, with the speed that is crucial to any modern business’s success.
“Technology changes so quickly that you have to use a third-party tool,” Chuck emphasizes. “That’s what we’re doing today.” So if you’re not thinking about how to get the most out of your third-party applications—and fast—it may be time to consider a company whose focus is on the cutting edge, and whose product is all about helping you get there: the SkyTouch Hotel OS®.
