Rob Grimes – Hi Rob Grimes with the IFBTA and I have the pleasure today to be with Bob Shecterle who is the Director of Marketing for Agilysys. So welcome Bob.
Bob Shecterle – Hi, thanks for having me!
RG – You know, you’re sort of in a unique position as a company. You’re talking about an integrated approach that certainly is going to appeal to many people, but sometimes people as they’re taking a look at a new application for their operation, they’re choosing something when they already have something in place. Now it occurs to me that if you’re doing a property management system in a hotel, you’re probably integrating and interfacing with your competitors in the point of sale market. And if you’re doing back office, you’re probably offering back office to a company that has franchisees or if they have multiple types of systems, you were actually offering not only a complete solution for those that want them but you’re also offering a best of breed solution at the same time.
BS – That’s exactly right. And look, you can’t be in the point of sale business at the level that we are as a leader of InfoGenesis and not integrate with dozens and dozens of different solutions. You’re absolutely right, some of those are our competitors. But that’s a key part of being able to deliver an integrated solution that is essentially one stop shop for the end-users. They might not buy those solutions from us but they know that we will integrate with them, we’ll make sure that the data flows back and forth effectively, and ultimately have access to that data.
RG – Many of your customers are also international customers. So are you offering an international solution in your portfolio?
BS – Yes, we’re a global company, we have customers throughout Europe and Asia, the Middle East so you’ll find Agilysys just about wherever you go.
RG – So I had the opportunity to attend your users conference and I find that very interesting because you had such a diverse set of users together but also to sort of talk about the strategy and what you have planned for the future. Are you able to share with us, as a partner, what may be coming down the pike or where the emphasis is going to be for the next 12 to 18 months?
BS – Well, you have teams dedicated to each of those industries so nobody is going to get short changed. But I think one of the things that you’re seeing is we built a new hospitality platform that we’ve called RGuest. Your guest is our guest. And with that platform, we really adopted an open architecture approach with standard APIs that makes it much easier to link all of those different systems that we’ve talked about – whether it’s systems from Agilysys, systems from our partners, or systems developed by our customers themselves – The RGuest platform with its open architecture enables that to happen much more effectively. And it makes all of those products available as we’ve just said, accessed more easily from the cloud or from on premise so all you need is a browser, essentially. So whether it’s on a mobile device, a laptop, or a terminal, you’ll be able to access all of those solutions.
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