DALLAS? Virtual private networks (VPNs), web portals, application systems providers (ASPs) and customer relationship management software. These are some of the product categories that will be bandied about at the Hospitality Industry Technology Exhibition & Conference this week as vendors and hotel decision-makers gather at the Dallas Convention Center. A number of the suppliers hawking these products are actually the same high-speed, in-room Internet providers, who over the past year have expanded their products to offer more than just fast connectivity to hotel guestrooms. As a result, many of these entrepreneurial companies, realizing a good deal of their profits are to be made from the ancillary products that go along with Internet access, have spent the year evolving their technology to develop web portals, create secure network environments through which business travelers can access corporate e-mail, and use the ?boxes? they install in guestrooms to hook up Internet service as technology platforms that will connect with other hotel applications, like those used for property management systems. There will also be many new faces in the in-room Internet access arena. HITEC officials report the number of exhibitors listed under ?Guestroom Interactive Services? totals 51 this year, marking an increase over last year?s 33. There will also be some absent faces, since some providers, failing to get venture capital, as well as market share, seem to have closed up shop as quickly as they had started up. Meanwhile, those in-room Internet providers that have survived have sharpened their strategies since last year, as they seek to find their niche in this competitive marketplace. CAIS Internet reports that it had as of late May installed its product in 65,000 guestrooms, with a total of 275,000 rooms to be installed by year?s end. It has signed many major hotels on a corporate level and as a result has the potential of signing 1.2 million hotel rooms under master franchise agreements. CAIS has continued to build alliances that give it as broad a market share as possible; its most recent is with Microsoft, which allows it to launch a co-branded portal with that technology giant for the hospitality industry. Gary Rabin, CAIS? chief strategy offices and executive vp/finance, said that that portal should be available to CAIS customers by late summer or early fall. Rabin said that CAIS this year has enhanced its product by enabling voice, data and video to flow via a single-wire pair from a hotel room. The company has developed two different Virtual Private Network products, one that hotel companies can use themselves to send secured information from one property to another; the second product gives hotel guests access to their own corporate Intranets. Darwin Networks, meanwhile, by the end of May expected to have 100 hotels deployed and has just signed with Choice Hotel?s new technology company, StayConnect, to provide a large percentage of Choice hotel rooms with high-speed Internet connectivity. David Wigglesworth, president of Darwin Network?s hospitality division, said that the company is focusing on increasing the number of services it provides to the hotels it has signed up as a revenue generator. Ancillary services the Internet provider is selling include videoconferencing, hotel lobby kiosks that can print out tickets to local events, and corporate VPNs and ASPs. Darwin also said it will be making an announcement at HITEC regarding an alliance with a portal provider. STSN, which won the lucrative Marriott International contract, expects to have the majority of that roll-out completed by the end of the summer. Marriott has also selected STSN for its other brands, including Ritz-Carlton, Residence Inns and SpringhillSuites. President Will West said that STSN is sticking with its strategy of installing each and every hotel room in the properties it signs up for its services so that business travelers can be guaranteed of havin
