Though bedeviled by the generally slow growth of meetings consolidation initiatives and acceptance of online third-party solutions as a key part of such programs, Web service providers are heartened some major companies made the leap as 2003 dawned. Several online meeting portals reported new contracts with Corporate Travel 100-level accounts for enterprisewide solutions.
Yet, those Web companies—many of which acknowledged this sector of the industry has not grown to the extent they thought it would years ago—still have issues. Like many Internet companies, none of the online meeting vendors actually is profitable. In fact, their financial health was called into question last year after the high-profile demise of a well-funded competitor. In addition, many corporations in 2002 viewed their meetings programs as an area simply to severely cut, not to integrate new solutions.
Yet, the suppliers prefer to view the glass as half-full. New revenue, of course, is better than no revenue, and the hope among them is that the major corporations currently using wide-ranging online services will prove to be the earliest of adopters.
"Corporate America had massive layoffs and reorganizations, but it's starting to stabilize," said Santa Clara, Calif.-based SeeUthere Technologies CEO John Chang. "People are stable enough to go through an investigation of consolidation products and close a deal. As a result, even without a pickup in the economy, it still should be a good year."
Westport, Conn.-based B-there.com last year introduced its OneForm data consolidation tool, and has signed contracts with Aetna, Procter & Gamble, Intel and Unisys. CEO Christine Berthet sees corporations not only interested in consolidation but also prepared to actually begin such a process—a leap online and offline meeting management companies have long waited for corporations to make. "In the last quarter of 2002, buyers were putting it in their budgets and either exploring or starting to explore what's out there," Berthet said, "but they're committed to it, and it's a faster process." In conjunction with its Attendee Relationship Management suite of products, B-there also is developing a solution to evaluate and document return on meeting investment to aid expenditure analysis.
PlanSoft grew its business on two separate fronts in 2002, said president Ed Tromczynski, gaining new corporate and third-party clients of its Meeting Management Services data consolidation product and signing deals to power search capabilities on hotel chain Web sites. Tromczynski said the Twinsburg, Ohio-based company has more than 25 large corporate MMS clients, including Anheuser-Busch, Intel and Rockwell Automation, the latter of which signed a two-year deal late in 2002. Tromczynski added that about 87 percent of the Fortune 100 uses PlanSoft products in some fashion, including its mpoint.com hotel search site. "We see a lot of signs that people are buying again," Tromczynski said. "Every one of our online statistics has doubled: number of requests for proposals sent, room nights requested, hotel searches conducted." This year, PlanSoft intends to integrate into MMS a housing and registration application for meetings of less than 500 attendees, which is being developed in-house, and create a stronger workflow engine that better routes leads from corporations to hotels.
Philadelphia-based StarCite's major accomplishments in 2002 were the purchase of attendee management tool RegWeb and partnership with online booking system Outtask, enabling attendees to book housing and air travel. CEO John Pino said StarCite will continue down the same path this year, which includes developing more partnerships with air booking engines he would not identify. "We don't want the user to worry about who they use for this or for that," Pino said. He added that StarCite had a handful of clients beta test the StarCite-RegWeb-Outtask system, with adoption starting to occur after this past Thanksgiving. Several major clients, including KPMG and Campbell Soup, have signed on to use at least some of StarCite's functionalities.
StarCite also focused on its RFP services in 2002, signing deals with hotels and third-party suppliers to increase such traffic. "There will be a major effort to find partners to drive RFP traffic through StarCite," Pino said. "We want to control the most qualified group RFPs in the world." Pino also included as a corporate goal further international development. As for its finances, "We're ahead of every plan we've ever had. The board and our investors are happy," Pino said. "Profitability is close now and is still in sight for 2003."
SeeUthere last year debuted its own consolidation product, MeetingView, and signed deals with a few more online booking engines in its effort to offer attendee air booking through any booking tool. Notably absent from its roster of partners, which includes TRX and KDS, is GetThere, which along with corporate parent Sabre's booking tools, holds the lion's share of the market. GetThere has chosen not to allow any meetings application besides its own DirectMeetings subsidiary
(Meetings Today, Dec. 9, 2002) to link to its transient booking engines.
Nevertheless, like Pino, Chang believes in the concept of partnerships between companies like his and air booking engines. "It has become a requirement for some corporations," he said. "They want to take advantage of meeting and group fares, as well as corporate negotiated fares. They want to adopt it and they want to implement it."
Tromczynski, though, said PlanSoft will pass on developing such deals itself, for now. "We just don't see anyone doing it in a serious, enterprisewide way," he said. "We are asked about it in RFPs, but it's still early. It's still just a check-off on an RFP. It's important that PlanSoft partner B-there can handle it, but we think more will happen on the housing and registration side. We'll be ready to step up to that in 2003."
SeeUthere's consolidation product has been adopted by a handful of clients, most notably PricewaterhouseCoopers. SeeUthere regarded those clients as paving the way and eventually offering proof of the financial benefits of online meetings consolidation.
The future plans of all these companies, however, assume their continued existence, which was called into question after the dissolution of Event411 this past summer
(Meetings Today, Aug. 12, 2002), certainly the most well-funded Internet meetings company to perish. All players confirmed their companies' financial health, and all point to profitability in the foreseeable future. All also are privately held and do not, as they are under no obligation to, release financial data to the general public.
Yet, the Event411 situation caused the market to take a second look at the companies' long-term prospects. "It made people concerned about financial stability," B-there's Berthet said. "But those who are well-funded came out of it well." Berthet said B-there could be profitable sometime this year.
Though there seems to be cause for tempered optimism, the industry simply has not reached the heights expected during the Internet boom of 1999 and early 2000. "It's nowhere close," StarCite's Pino said. "There have been a number of challenges and obstacles. The industry has had its problems, and now we may have to deal with a war. But we're getting a little tailwind, and things look better."