BIO

Israel is a business and technology leader who has contributed the technology vision as  key strategist and designer behind the enterprise technology roadmaps of large hospitality and travel companies.  Israel has also have developed and deployed various mission-critical systems and in the process, he's been instrumental in creating and building effective and skilled internal development groups.

Israel has been recognized by Computerworld as a Premiere 100 IT honoree.  In his current role as Principal of Abstraction Consulting, Israel is providing executive consulting and acting-CIO and CTO services to large US and Mexican companies.

While Senior Vice President & CTO for IHG (InterContinental Hotels Group Plc), he led the core systems and strategic technology transformation efforts, designing, and implementing IHG's enterprise-wide architecture roadmap.

Previously, as Senior VP—Technology Solutions at Starwood, he oversaw the development of technology solutions for guest-facing applications, including web channel and property management systems.  Both at IHG and in Starwood, Israel has successfully architected and driven hotel reservation systems using the latest generation Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) solutions.

As Vice President, Enterprise Architecture with Sabre Inc., a major computer reservations system, and provider of technology solutions for the travel and transportation industry.  During his tenure there, Israel defined and introduced new open-technology solutions supporting high-performance, complex transaction environments. 

Prior to working for Sabre, he worked with Galileo International, where he spearheaded the introduction of distributed reservation technologies to thousands of travel agencies and drove introduction of TCP/IP connectivity worldwide.

His career also includes working for United Airlines and IBM.  During his time with United Airlines, Israel pioneered the diskless workstation LAN infrastructure at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, and while at IBM he provided international support to IBM’s world trade systems engineering organizations, including writing IBM Red Books on networking and on UNIX Internals.  He holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronics & Communications from Mexico’s National Polytechnic Institute.