Austin, Texas — The pandemic underscored the need for hospitality providers to have flexible systems that can be adapted quickly to exceed changing guest expectations. Making it easier for partners to adapt and innovate, Oracle has made the REST API specifications in the Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform (OHIP) freely accessible through GitHub under the Universal Permissive License (UPL) model.
By opening the REST API specifications for Oracle Hospitality OPERA Cloud, the entire hospitality industry can directly benefit from years of development efforts. The move offers hoteliers a way to adopt new solutions faster and represents a step towards having a common industry reference for REST APIs. The update was unveiled during Oracle Hospitality’s second annual Innovation Week virtual event, which brought together nearly 400 attendees from 60 countries.
“We have heard over and over from customers and partners that they would like to reuse or take inspiration from our REST API specs. They want our APIs to become the industry reference and are asking us to make it possible,” said Laura Calin, vice president of strategy at Oracle Hospitality. “With this update, we are making this vision of an open architecture a reality and taking APIs in hospitality to a completely new level.”
The Oracle Hospitality Integration Platform centralizes, consolidates, and streamlines data and processes across hotel operations into a single and unified platform. It enables hoteliers to ‘plug-in’ applications from the Oracle Cloud Marketplace and third-party application providers to improve operations and elevate guest experiences in a matter of days and weeks rather than months or years. The offering is available to OPERA Cloud customers at no additional cost.
“According to IDC data, 22 percent of hospitality and travel organizations cite insufficient data as a top challenge impeding innovation strategies,” said Dorothy Creamer, senior research analyst, hospitality and travel digital transformation strategies, IDC. “Key priorities for hospitality to rebound from the COVID-19 crisis and achieve digital resiliency will be building technology ecosystems that allow rapid innovation, drive profit, and improve efficiency. To achieve this, they are seeking and will invest in solution partners that will support a flexible infrastructure with numerous integration partners that will deliver consistent and customized services to guests.”
The integration platform includes secure access to more than 3,000 modern REST API capabilities; an end-to-end self-service experience, from registration, discovery, and use of the APIs, to the publication and/or discovery of solutions in the Oracle Cloud Marketplace; reduced partner fees as there is no longer a mandatory certification process; and accelerated delivery enabled through a real-time feedback channel where users of the platform and product managers interact around the clock to identify impediments and find solutions.
“Since its debut in late 2020, more than 100 partners and many of our customers are now actively building integrations against our REST APIs,” said Luis Weir, senior director of strategy at Oracle Hospitality.
“By leveraging the OPERA REST API specs and OHIP, we will be able to include virtually every hospitality capability into our solution. This, in turn, will enable hospitality developers to tap into any of these capabilities in a matter of seconds rather than weeks or months of tedious work,” said Zdenek Nemec, founder and CTO of superface.ai. “Open access to API specifications is a crucial step towards open standards in hospitality and autonomous software integration.”
