CHICAGO – (March 23, 2010) – At the annual awards ceremony at its Members' Meeting and Conference in Orlando earlier this month, Hotel Technology Next Generation (HTNG) recognized two individuals for major contributions to advancing the state of hotel technology during 2009.  HTNG’s board of directors recognized Dayna Kully of MobileAccess Networks and Sue Zloth of Merchant Link with Directors’ Leadership Awards for 2009.

“Our organization has been blessed to have the dynamic leadership of these two excellent technologists and business leaders.  What they’ve done to benefit the industry through their dedication to our organization is remarkable,” said Douglas Rice, Executive Vice President & CEO.

Dayna Kully is the Vice President of Channel and Market Strategy for MobileAccess Networks.  MobileAccess is a global provider of reliable wireless coverage solutions for all indoor wireless environments.  Dayna has helped drive several projects for HTNG as a member of the Networking and Infrastructure workgroup and the European Advisory Team.  “The board particularly wanted to recognize Dayna for her commitment to HTNG, the output she delivers in the workgroups, and the enthusiasm she brings to all of her projects,” commented Rice.  One document that Dayna was instrumental in developing is the Distributed Antenna Systems (DAS) reference guide for hoteliers.  The document outlines how to deploy a relatively simple and cost-effective technology that reaps great rewards in improving cell phone and radio coverage throughout hotels.  She is also a primary architect behind the Infrastructure Workgroup’s hotelier survey that gauges the technology challenges, vision and views of hotel CIOs from the major hotel brands.  The survey will identify the types of infrastructure required to support a broad range of hospitality applications for at least the next 3-5 years.

Sue Zloth is a Product Group Manager for Merchant Link and has been very active in managing the Payment Systems & Data Security Workgroup.  She has led the workgroup through two successful certification cycles, resulting in a certifiable Data Proxy specification (released 2009B), and a soon-to-be released certifiable Payment Processing specification (2010A release).  “Sue is truly an expert in her field,” said Rice, “We appreciate her dedication to our workgroup and her focus to lead the team to a very practical and effective solution that will provide greater payment systems security for the industry.” In particular, Sue’s award is reflective of her exemplary project planning and leadership skills and her extreme dedication to resolving the industry’s issues within her scope.  “The hotel and lodging industry is rapidly becoming a target for hackers that are looking to breach customer data at the point of sale,” said Sue Zloth.  “I’m honored to receive recognition from HTNG but more importantly, I believe it is very necessary to ensure this industry is educated about the data security risks and take steps to create standards around payment processing and point of sales to reduce vulnerabilities and ensure safe transactions.”

Directors' Leadership Award
Each year, the board of directors recognizes one or two HTNG members for their outstanding contributions to advancing the state of hospitality technology, typically through extensive and effective volunteer efforts within HTNG's focused workgroups.  HTNG’s board of directors, which now consists of 14 CIO-level hotel IT executives, is the key direction-setting body for the organization.  HTNG’s board actively provides direction and prioritization on the key issues that these industry leaders face in their daily tasks of improving technology for the more than 2.3 million hotel rooms worldwide within the scope of their responsibility.  The board includes most of the world’s largest hotel companies, as well as several midsized and smaller hotel groups across a range of hotel types.  A full list of board members is available at www.htng.org/about/index.htm.
 
HTNG North American Members’ Meeting
HTNG bestows its top annual award, the Directors’ Leadership Award, every year at the North American Members’ Meeting.  This year’s event was in Orlando and featured a premier series of general session speakers covering key hospitality issues such as cloud computing, virtualization, security breaches, generation Y, social media and more. In addition, several HTNG workgroups provided demonstration tables that highlighted the solutions that are now available through the collaborative work of the 20+ workgroups actively addressing hospitality technology’s larger issues.
Hotel technology professionals who are interested in learning more about work of HTNG can visit the company’s website at www.htng.org.

About Hotel Technology Next Generation
The premier technology solutions association in the hospitality industry, HTNG is a self-funded, non-profit organization with members from hotel and hospitality companies, technology vendors to hospitality, and other industry members including consultants, media, and academic experts.  HTNG’s members participate in focused workgroups to bring to market open solution sets addressing specific business problems.  HTNG fosters the selection and adoption of existing open standards.  Where necessary, it also develops new open standards to meet the needs of the global hospitality industry.
Membership in HTNG is open to hotel and hospitality companies, technology vendors to hospitality, consultants, academics, press and others.  Currently, more than 400 corporate and individual members from across this spectrum, including most of the world’s leading hotel companies and technology vendors, are active HTNG participants.  HTNG’s board of directors alone represents more than 2.3 million guest rooms – with the total rooms impacted by all of HTNG’s hotelier members surpassing 4.3 millions rooms worldwide. Workgroup proceedings, drafts, and specifications are published for all HTNG members as soon as they are created, encouraging rapid and broad adoption.  Specifications are released to the public domain as they are ratified by the workgroup.  For more information, visit www.htng.org.