IDS Next Makes Impressive Growth Strides in 2015

For any company in the hospitality industry, each year brings new challenges and opportunities. The hospitality industry is currently bristling with innovation, and offers wonderfully interesting learning and insights to growing companies. These insights enable hotels to continuously set benchmarks of enhanced guest service. At IDS Next, we also go through the same process of improvement and enhancement.

In August, we celebrate our foundation anniversary and this year has been one of many achievements in terms of rolling out new products and initiatives. Here are some of the key highlights -

Acquired over 4000 customers

In FY 2014-15, we crossed the 4000 client’s milestone. We acquired new customers in all the geographies we are present in, namely South East Asia, Oceania, Indian sub-continent, Middle East and Africa. Armed with our world-class Hotel ERP and a seamlessly integrated Hotel 360 solution set, we look forward to aggressive expansion in the coming year.

Forayed into Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Region

As part of our expansion plan, we launched our products in the ASEAN region this year. To empower the rapidly expanding hotel industries in Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Philippines and Indonesia, we launched an exclusive microsite. The microsite carries in-depth information about our products and solution, and a compelling case for hotels to adopt IDS Next’s integrated Hotel ERP.

Hotel 360 Hospitality Solution

Hotel 360 hospitality solutions are a comprehensive offering designed to empower the hotel ERP to automate distribution. The solutions in this bouquet are carefully stitched together for hotels to leverage intelligence, grow occupancy and profitability. The Hotel 360 Hospitality Solutions include business analytics, revenue management, online reputation management, a large distribution offering, channel manager, web booking engine, central reservation system, mobile apps and more. All these solutions are seamlessly integrated into the Hotel ERP to help IDS Next clients reduce manual effort and witness increased operational automation.

Guest Facing mode of Easy Dine e-menu app launched

With diners becoming tech savvy, what better way for restaurants to wow them than with a cool tablet based menu. The guest facing mode of Easy Dine e-menu app allows customers to browse through the menu, review visually rich pictures, recipes, videos and order their food without the assistance of a steward.

They can even customize their orders as per their preferences and send special notes/instructions to the chef while placing their order. Restaurants using Easy Dine app can now ensure uniform, high quality guest service at their fine dining outlet.

Launched SkyRes – Cloud based Central Reservation System

Every year, we launch new product and this year too we have done that successfully. SkyRes was launched to help chains and groups hotels access end-to-end real-time reservation solution. We tied up with Microsoft to build this cloud-based central reservation system on their Azure platform. Hotels using SkyRes can have access to global distribution system (GDS) and other online distribution platforms from a single window as well.

Strategic Partnership with Pine Labs

To help our software users simplify payment acceptance process, we partnered with Pine Labs, a leading provider of retail Point of Sale and electronic data capture solutions. We integrated their secured payment solution into our FortuneNEXT 6i Suite of Hotel ERP. This partnership offers hotels an opportunity to achieve all the security compliance requirements of banks and regulators including Unique Key Per Transaction (UKPT data encryption standard), Terminal Line Encryption (TLE), EuroPay, MasterCard and VISA (EMV) and Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).

Partnership with TripAdvisor

Online visibility for hotels is directly related to hotel occupancy. To assist our clients to collect reviews and feedback from their guests, we tied up with TripAdvisor to integrate guest review collection tool, Review Express into our Hotel ERP. This partnership enables hotels to send customized emails to their recently checked out guests and can get feedback. The entire process aims to assist hotels increase and improve their online reputation.

While the year gone by has been extremely productive for IDS Next, we are looking forward to the coming year with great anticipation, as we have a host of solutions in the wing. We will soon be adding a mobile app exclusively for general managers of hotels. The app will empower individual and group general managers with instant alerts on critical business operations, real-time hotel position, end of day hotel position for faster and smarter decision-making.

Debi Prasad Sarangi handles Corporate Communications at Ids Next Business Solutions, a global leader in the domain of hospitality technology solutions.