With a new leadership team in place, Deem is honing its
focus on its core travel, expense and ground transportation offerings, president
and COO John Rizzo told BTN.
The company has a long history of reinvention and name
changes, but this newest reset "narrows Deem's focus back to its
beginning," said Rizzo, who joined Deem from software company SolarWinds
in April. Recent leadership
appointments include familiar faces, including senior vice president and
chief commercial officer Tony D'Astolfo and senior vice president of software
Chethan Visweswar, and "traditional Silicon Valley people," he said.
"Even though we're not a start-up, I'm trying to create
a start-up-y feel for a company that's been in business for 15 years and has a
lot of domain expertise," Rizzo said. "That's why we went through
this fairly aggressive program to refresh the leadership team."
While the company is still getting a handle on its vision
and strategy, "innovate in travel" will be at the forefront, he said.
"I don't think, from a technology perspective, the market has gotten to a
point where there is a de facto standard for a great app that a traveler uses
while traveling or a travel management company uses while booking travel or a
corporate travel manager uses to inspect travel," Rizzo said. "What
we're trying to do over the next five years is build a platform allowing each
of those constituents to view the Deem technology as best in class."
Recent moves include partnerships to improve international
travel bookings, something the company did not focus on during the period when
its ambitions were broader, he said. In July, the company partnered with hotel
booking portal HRS to access its thousands of hotels that aren't available
through global distribution systems. It also expanded its partnership with rail
content provider SilverRail, gaining broader coverage in international markets.
Deem also renewed its multiyear agreement with American
Express Global Business Travel, though Amex GBT will offer some
"additional innovation," according to Rizzo.
Ground Transportation
Plans
On the ground transportation side, Deem will relaunch the
cloud-based reservation and dispatching tool it gained when it acquired Whisk.
Deem has stored info on its servers for about a decade, and the two systems
will complement each other, making implementation easier for suppliers, he
said. The goal is to "put traditional car service operators on the same
level in a cloud that Uber and Lyft offers to their customers," Rizzo
said.
Ultimately, Deem seeks to develop an application
"offering the best of both worlds" in both on- and short-lead-time ground
transportation bookings, as well as traditional car bookings. He adds that the
app will benefit from Deem's extensive collection of data. "We process an
enormous number of PNRs for travelers, and all that data is sitting in our
system," Rizzo said. "That’s something Uber and Lyft can't do, to the
extent that we are aware of flight changes happening and can provide that data
to car service operators. There are a lot of things we can do that can help
provide a level of convenience to the travelers."