TI's '98 Tech Agenda Includes Global Booking, Data Warehousing

TI's '98 Tech Agenda Includes Global Booking, Data Warehousing

By Laurie Berger

Dallas - While most companies are first deciding which corporate booking tool to deploy, Texas Instruments is blazing new trails in Webspace. Global rollouts of its booking system, a data warehousing project and an online leisure program top its tech agenda for 1998.

"This will be a big year for multinational corporations," said travel systems manager Richard Wooten. "We're moving corporate booking and expense solutions into the global arena." TI, which has spent the past eight months launching Internet Travel Network's engine domestically, will introduce the system to its U.K. locations in the first quarter, and add France and Germany in the second. "After that, we'll figure out how to deal with Asia," Wooten said.

TI will be ITN's first global account, with a dedicated account manager in Europe. But despite the fact that the system can access the Sabre, Galileo, Worldspan and Apollo CRSs, TI still will be limited in its ability to handle the faring of complicated international bookings. "We're pushing suppliers to develop the complex algorithms to allow it," Wooten said. "But until they do, we're telling travelers to use the system only for simple overseas roundtrips."

Wooten is focusing on leisure travel to help drive online usage from the current 9 percent of domestic reservations to 30 percent by June. He plans to tap suppliers to offer discounted air, hotel, car, cruise and vacation packages through a version of the booking engine from which policy controls have been removed. "This will really help adoption rates by getting people acquainted with online booking and building their confidence," he said.

TI also plans to secure raw feeds from ITN for a warehouse of reservation, expense reporting and agency data, and to buy an expense reporting package that will integrate with the ITN booking engine. "In our initial RFP in February 1996, we wanted one company to do it all. But it's too big for one company to get its arms around. Instead, we'll do lots of partnerships to create an end-to-end solution this year," Wooten said.