Less than two years ago, hospitality data platform Otelier was known as MyDigitalOffice. When it rebranded under its new moniker in early 2024, it brought together a suite of back-office automation, budgeting and forecasting and business-intelligence solutions.
Rebranding was a “great decision,” CEO Rob Lawrence said, because the company is now reaping the benefits of consolidating what it offers to hotels. “We had all these redundant capabilities in the business,” he said. “We should take all of these capabilities and converge the best of all of the different products into a single unified modern business-intelligence platform that is built on modern tech.” The company spent much of 2024 developing its new platform, and Lawrence joined the team at the end of that year. “That work was in flight when I joined the business.”
Expansion
Since joining the team, Lawrence has focused on “capability convergence into best-of products” and getting the business “fully integrated and operating as a single entity” following several acquisitions that had been completed before he arrived.
Once he was in his new role, Lawrence oversaw the rollout of two notable upgrades to Otelier’s product suite.
The first was the next generation of the company’s budgeting and forecasting platform, TruePlan, updated to deliver improved cross-data analytics and support faster development of tools, including artificial intelligence. This upgrade was especially “critical” for hoteliers, Lawrence said—“not only planning and budgeting for annual budgets, but [for] that forecasting process that a lot of hoteliers need to focus on, almost on a weekly basis.”
The next was an updated business-intelligence platform, IntelliSight. "We're pioneers in business intelligence for large hotel businesses,” Lawrence said. The team took its existing capabilities and converged the best of the different products into a single unified modern platform—“a modern cloud infrastructure with a Snowflake back end and a Power BI front end.”
After a year at the helm of the company, Lawrence is excited about the new products and Otelier’s capabilities for growth. “It positions us really well in the market vis-a-vis our competition.”
Clicking With Clients
“Every single customer's environment is different,” Lawrence said. When the Otelier team begins working with a client, they look to understand the customer’s technology landscape and their systems matrix. “We have this ability to normalize data, but we have to consider all of the factors in it, in any individual customer's IT environment. … We need to understand those characteristics of a customer before we even get started working with them to be able to solution out the right approach to getting them set up with business intelligence and planning and budgeting, as well as a bunch of the automation tools.”
This article was originally published in the February/March edition of Hotel Management magazine. Subscribe here.