Once again proving its willingness to incorporate new or little-known technology suppliers into its travel and meeting operations, Akamai Technologies has chosen an obscure technology firm with an unusual pricing structure to handle registration and attendee management for nearly all of its meetings.
Cambridge, Mass.-based Akamai, which last year became the first company to publicly announce a full transition to Expedia Corporate Travel and largely has become the public face of ECT's efforts to gain a stronghold in the corporate transient market
(BTN, Sept. 22, 2003), has implemented a registration solution offered by Admin Esolutions, a division of Delray Beach, Fla.-based independent meetings management firm Dupont Meetings International. The tool will be used to manage attendee registration, electronic marketing and rooming list management for Akamai events, said manager of meeting and travel services Terry Sullo.
Admin Esolutions does not offer integrated air and hotel attendee management services, as do larger meetings technology firms. However, the company's pricing structure is significantly different than most other meetings tech offerings: Admin Esolutions charges $2,965 annually, plus an initial $1,000 set-up fee, for an unlimited number of registrations. Most larger attendee management firms charge a transaction fee.
"It's an ideal product for a midsize company like ours, because it offers a full array of registration services to correspond with attendees without the extravagances," Sullo said. Akamai books about $3 million annually in domestic air volume and holds between 60 and 80 meetings each year, some very large. "The bells and whistles on other tools are fabulous, but you pay for them."
Akamai's embrace of Admin Esolutions does not necessarily signify a larger trend, but it should hearten the scores of small meetings technology firms that seek a share of a marketplace increasingly dominated by large meetings technology companies and travel and meetings management companies' tech products.
Typically, these smaller companies offer some type of registration management solution, though few—if any—can claim to be the exclusive supplier to a company as large as Akamai.
"There're a lot of these small companies with three or four employees that are trying to find a niche," said Corbin Ball, meetings technology consultant and president of Bellingham, Wash.-based Corbin Ball Associates. "It's not difficult; you get the applications written, and there you go."
Ball noted that many corporations that use more prominent technological products often use but a fraction of the tools' services. "Most use online reg tools only to 10 percent of capacity," Ball said. "There are speaker, exhibition and survey management, as well as consolidation options that many corporations don't use."
Ball pointed to two smaller technology companies and their tools—Boulder Colo.-based Effectek Inc.'s RegOnline and Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based EmeetingsOnline—as firms that have developed a niche due to functionality and pricing. Otherwise, though, many smaller firms fail. On his Web site, Ball maintains an extensive list of such suppliers that requires frequent updates. "A lot of them don't last," he said. "Invariably when updating, I find a lot of sites that are no longer active."
Admin Esolutions and DMI president and CEO Antoine Dupont said the pricing structure was implemented because his company is not specifically a meeting technology firm. "We're not an online registration software company," he said. "We set people up with Web sites and content management software. They have control of accessing and managing information, and one module is online registration. I'm not interested in capitalizing on that alone. I'm interested in selling Web sites."
Dupont said Admin Esolutions has sold sites for online registration to Unilever Bestfoods North America and Office Depot for single, annual events, and said Johnson & Johnson has inquired about the pricing structure, but noted the solution is not built to handle the entire meetings volumes of companies of that size. "It's not what the system does," he said. "We don't want to sell where it's not appropriate, but it's ideal for Terry."
Sullo said she initially was introduced to Dupont's offerings last summer, following an unsolicited e-mail advertisement. "My name is on some list somewhere," she said. Akamai had no companywide online registration solution, and Sullo had managed that information manually, via spreadsheets and individual e-mails. "I needed some relief," she said. She chose Admin Esolutions after an extensive review of the tool, the company and the underlying software behind it, she noted.
Sullo has developed a very strong policy for Akamai meetings
(Meetings Today, July 15, 2002), with a full mandate that all events must be registered through her. This has enabled her to deploy the registration tool for nearly every meeting, and though she said it is difficult to put a dollar amount on the subsequent savings and productivity gains for Akamai, she said it exceeds the cost of the software. "It was worth it for one meeting alone," Sullo said. "I wish I tracked the time savings involved, but it could be the equivalent of one staff member."
As for the services Admin Esolutions does not offer—including offering integration with online air booking tools—Sullo said Akamai does not yet need them.
Developments with Akamai's online agency following Sullo's selection of Admin Esolutions have raised questions, though, about Akamai's future course: In November 2003, Expedia Corporate Travel signed a deal with SeeUthere Technologies to offer ECT clients SeeUthere's attendee management and data consolidation technology tools
(Meetings Today, Dec. 8, 2003).Sullo has not retained SeeUthere's services but said she may in the future. "SeeUthere is fabulous, and I expect we'll end up on that product at some time," Sullo said. "In between, we're not ready for the whole integration. I may keep [Admin Esolutions] and pay the agency to use their services for air. I credit Expedia for ensuring they have such a solution."