In today’s era of big data, hospitality’s integration challenges may be daunting, but it’s important to understand that they’re not unique. Other global industries have experienced these same challenges on a massive scale over the past decade, and have already developed and applied advanced technologies that were specifically designed to solve them.
With this in mind, there is a great opportunity for the hospitality sector to adopt some of the best practices from other industries. By applying technologies that were designed to solve larger problems in other sectors, the global hotel market can shorten the learning curve and successfully tame the data integration beast.
Hapi is a data integration platform designed to streamline the way hospitality organizations integrate their various systems.
It’s built on a massively scalable data integration foundation using Apache Kafka and exposes near real-time multi-directional data streams to and from the various hospitality systems of record, such as the PMS.
Check out this intro video of Kafka Streams: https://youtu.be/Z3JKCLG3VP4
Many large companies use Kafka for data processing at scale. It originated at LinkedIn, where it tracks user activity data and operational metrics. It gets used by other companies too like Spotify, Uber, Tumbler, Goldman Sachs, PayPal, Box, Cisco, CloudFlare, NetFlix, and much more.
We decided to apply the same technology to solve the data integration needs of the hospitality industry. By creating standardized connectors to various systems and placing hospitality data on a data stream, we are opening up new use cases for systems that have so far suffered from lack of simple and reliable connectivity.
We saw one glaring opportunity for using the Hapi platform in enabling advanced CRM use cases. For example, as the world’s leading CRM platform, Salesforce is already being used by many hotel organizations for B2B and group sales.
By applying the power of Salesforce to the rest of the hospitality operation (both on-property and at chain level) and infusing it with enriched data, we can add tremendous value to customer engagement strategies.
Recognizing the potential of this approach, we partnered with Aquiva Labs, a Salesforce Product Development Partner (PDO), to create a native application package called “Hapi-Connect” to integrate hotel data streams within the Salesforce CRM.
Our new Salesforce.com connector app provides a robust toolset for hotel companies, allowing them to make use of the valuable hotel systems data accessed from PMS and other hotel systems via Hapi in a manner that will scale to thousands of hotels within their portfolios.
The Hapi-Connect package allows for bi-directional synchronization of reservations, as well as guest and company profiles, and provides a set of Lightning components and controls to interact with hotel data within the native CRM user experience.
With Hapi-Connect, hotels can now tackle B2B Sales, Loyalty & Recognition, and Hotel Operations use-cases, bolstered by near real-time reservation and stay data.
The new connector solves the industry-wide challenge of integrating the various data streams generated by disparate property systems, such as the PMS, CRS, and others, and making it actionable.
Hapi-Connect has been officially approved for the Salesforce.com AppExchange marketplace and is ready to begin solving challenges in hospitality today in the Salesforce Community.
To schedule a demo of Hapi-Connect, click here.
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