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Technologies related to hardware, application software and communications are all touted as necessary to successfully implementing defining business strategies in a competitive market place. In addition, “enterprise” capacity has taken on an important new meaning. With the advent of the “web”, internet computing is quickly expanding to become a core part of a company’s ability to provide business enhancing solutions and services to clients.

Numerous surveys have shown that, indeed, successful companies in the hospitality vertical combine business strategies with the technological means to carry out those strategies. That is not to say, however, that money thrown at technology will guarantee increased profitability, or that a company has to be big in order to afford technology. Indeed technology is seen by some as a necessary cost to be minimized as one would minimize waste!

This attitude did not spring from a vacuum. The balkanized nature of rapidly evolving technological capabilities has not served users well. Technology was being sold for is own sake. The results can be seen in fractured technology infrastructure, little or no application integration and systems that do not give current information needed for real time decision making. Support for disparate systems also has become a nightmare. This approach has guaranteed expensive obsolescence and garnered user resistance.

Technology is not limited to the introduction of new hardware or application feature sets alone, it is also related to new systems enabling technologies that result in the development of common technological infrastructure that can be delivered in an understandable supportable and cost effective manner. New technical capabilities, related to distributed object and network design philosophies, programming languages, operating environments and file-handling systems etc., can all contribute to infrastructure standardization.

As a technology developer, Tesoro believes it is important to deliver systems that can evolve over time as new application ideas and hardware devices come to the fore. Application systems can no longer be, simply, point-in-time products. Data will need to be handled in common ways in robust communication environments. Application systems will need to be built around open standards to keep both costs down and integration seamless. They will have to become cross-platform compatible and operate in mixed environments with the greatest degree of fault tolerance, data integrity, and do this as transparently as possible for the user.

Great opportunities lie in a technology developer’s ability to design and deliver systems that will preserve end users’ investments in technological evolution and maximize ROI in the process. The biggest challenge will be to convince users that it is, in fact, possible.