The merger of former meetings technology foes PlanSoft Inc. and SeeUthere Technologies into a new firm called OnVantage Inc. likely marks the end of the meetings industry's two-year dot-com shakeout and leaves two primary rivals poised to compete for corporate business. Though the immediate effect on corporate buyers seeking meetings technology is minimal, the transaction could be the first step in the transformation of the industry segment and its relationship with other travel suppliers.
The merger
(BTN, Sept. 6) created a new company that is split into two divisions, one focusing on the corporate market, the other targeting suppliers. PlanSoft's tools for the corporate market, including its Meeting Management Solutions consolidation tool and its Qreg registration application, no longer will be available to the corporate market, apart from current customers, as OnVantage will offer SeeUthere's products to corporate buyers. Both companies' most senior executives for now are part of OnVantage management. SeeUthere CEO and president John Chang will serve as OnVantage CEO, as PlanSoft CEO David Hunt steps in as chairman. SeeUthere president Stanley Chin and PlanSoft president Ed Tromczynski are presidents of OnVantage's corporate and supplier divisions, respectively.
The meetings technology battle lines now are clearly marked. OnVantage will compete with StarCite Inc. of Philadelphia for corporate accounts. Though other tools exist, including those proffered by such travel and meeting management companies as Carlson Wagonlit and WorldTravel Meetings & Incentives and technology firms as Certain Software, most observers see OnVantage and StarCite as the suppliers with the widest reach.
"They will be able to compete on equal footing for large corporate accounts, where both of their sights are set," said Rodman Marymor, CEO of Berkeley, Calif.-based meetings technology consulting firm Cardinal Communications. "This hook-up is good for everyone involved. They both needed to do something as StarCite moves. Now there are two leaders."
The rivals' executives agreed. "This is it. The lines are drawn, and it will be up to whomever can execute the best," Chang said. "We will see who will be the market leader and how big we all can grow the market. We will compete, but we jointly need to teach the market about technology."
"We will not change anything," said Dwayne Spradlin, StarCite president and COO in a written statement. "We have two or more years on OnVantage. StarCite was founded as an online marketplace, probably closer to PlanSoft's model. Since then, we acquired several companies and now have very well defined tools in procurement, cost management, attendee registration and housing and integrated analytics. On the supplier side, we stopped focusing uniquely on ad banners and listings and went beyond marketing to powering supplier Web sites. We started doing this two years ago in a highly integrated model. They have to do more than just slap the two product spec sheets together. It is more complicated than just saying the data listings are all there. They have to build a business out of it. That is what we have done for two years."
The move is but the latest, though possibly the last, in the long-predicted wave of consolidation to sweep the industry, with casualties such as Event411.com and ProcurePoint, acquisitions including StarCite Inc.'s purchase of B-there as well as GetThere's recent decision to cease offering its DirectMeetings tool as a separate product
(Meetings Today, Aug. 2)."The weaker players have been weeded out, and those that are still alive will do well enough to survive," Chang said.
The merger also raises the possibility of the meetings industry's first publicly traded company, as Chang said OnVantage will work toward an initial public stock offering. "The markets are stronger, investors more bullish and this merger makes sense from the investor perspective," he said. "A company that wants to go public must meet certain standards. This shortens the time for a potential IPO for us by one to two years. Our growth will accelerate and we have a stronger chance to get there. The best companies are those that are built to endure and to go public as a standalone operation."
All of the alliances and partnerships SeeUthere and PlanSoft built with travel and meeting management companies and transient technology firms will hold, Chang said. One such partnership, SeeUthere's deal with Expedia Corporate Travel
(Meetings Today, Dec. 8, 2003), may offer a hint as to the future direction of the industry. As online travel management companies grow in prominence, some observers view deeper ITMC penetration into the meetings industry as inescapable.
"It is inevitable that the ITMCs will participate in this industry, but how they'll do so remains to be seen," Marymor said. "They may build, but they will more likely acquire. It is naïve to think they are unaware of mergers like this and naïve to think they have no interest."
In the short term, though, the industry will adjust to a different set of options. "We're in a holding pattern. There's nothing new or different," said Julie Steible, events manager at Dayton, Ohio-based NCR Corp., which is a user of SeeUthere attendee management products. "We've not had any personal communication about the change, but it seems it can only be good for clients of both companies." Steible added NCR annually pre-pays SeeUthere for a specific number of transactions, so the company will see no impact until 2005.
The deal, an all-stock transaction, was billed as a merger of equals. "It's a 50/50 transaction, every letter and every number," Tromczynski said. Chang warned against presuming otherwise, given his assumption of the new company's CEO position and SeeUthere's Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters serving as OnVantage's headquarters. "It's very circumstantial," Chang said. "These decisions always are, and you shouldn't read too much into it."