Net Retriever Article in Gold Coast Business News
Posted on 05. Jun, 2005 by Sascha Voevodin in Articles, News
GOLD COAST HOSPITALITY GETS SMART
Gold Coast Business News | May / June 2005
Net Retriever is setting the standard in connectivity.
Gold Coast based Votech has developed Net Retriever – a communications package that sits between hardware devices and property management systems (PMS) software. Tech wizard Alex Voevodin says Net Retriever is a universal translator.
“It’s a kind of Switzerland to the software world. It collects data from the hardware and software and converting it into useable formats for any system – regardless of what formats they are using. It is quite a simple concept that has excited a lot of developers and enabled a lot of hardware and software systems to become instantly compatible. The list of hardware devices and PMs that are Net Retriever compatible is growing at a phenomenal rate,” he says.
“Net Retriever is a middleware package that facilitates communications between a multitude of hardware devices used to provide the guest services (such as high speed internet access, voice-over internet protocol and digital video-gaming on demand) and the PMS. This may sound simple but until now, every device had to stand alone or output a format that the PMS would accept. Then every PMS had to develop an interface to transfer data to and from the device using the correct format. A very time consuming (and expensive) way to communicate that has many weak points and an overall resistance to compatibility,” Mr Voevodin says.
Now every device and every PMS exists as separate entities developed by unrelated companies. No industry standard specification has ever been created and no proprietary format has been widely accepted. Generally, devices and PMS send or receive their own proprietary formats to thwart competitors and are bound by non-disclosure agreements – making the widespread adoption of any common format a near impossibility,” he says.
Hotel and resort operators, business people who run operations involving a large number of people will find this system provides a communication asset that was formerly out of reach. Visit www.votech.com.au to find out more.
