IBM, Sabre To Integrate Expense, Booking Tools

IBM and Sabre today announced plans to roll out a jointly developed integrated expense management and online booking solution early in the second quarter that combines their GERS and GetThere platforms, respectively.

The two companies will target common corporate accounts with the initial deployment of their integrated solution. A broader deployment is scheduled for later this year.

Unlike GetThere's other relationships with expense management software providers, the two technology companies are sharing development resources to build interoperability, enabling the automated population of the expense report with travel data and corporate card data.

In addition, the joint offering carries a data repository for internal benchmarking and analytic tools, which can serve as a platform for IBM's consulting services, according to IBM GERS director Raymond Curatolo.

The GERS-GetThere relationship offers a new pricing model, which GetThere president Chris Kroeger called a "trip-centric" or passenger-name-record pricing approach, as opposed to the expense-report-volume model.

Kroeger said the IBM partnership does not affect GetThere's other expense relationships, including a marketing and sales partnership with SAP, announced in June 2008.

However, according to Kroeger, the joint product with IBM is the only one to be sold by the more than 100 GetThere travel management company resellers. "We have by design a range of options for our customers, whether it's just data exchange between booking tool and existing expense tool or a partnerships that we have with Data-Basics or SAP," Kroeger said. "The partnership we are announcing today is in addition to that suite of options. We see them as complementary to each other."

GetThere today said it has more than 3,000 corporate accounts. IBM's expense systems are used by more than 80 large direct corporate clients and more than 400 midmarket companies, according to Curatolo. It is available in more than 60 countries in 20 languages. The technology can be customized, but there are no plans to produce different versions for varying company sizes.

"The technology is built in a way that is easily configurable," Curatolo said. "There is really nothing other than maybe the way it's integrated into a client's financial system, but the core expense report process is consistent across a large corporation right down to a small company. The baseline is the same."

Sabre's roots date back to the 1950s, when IBM worked with American Airlines to build the Semi-Automated Business Research Environment—SABRE—electronic reservation system, and its latest partnership also was years in the making.

"IBM and Sabre first took a look at this in the very early goings of online booking tool and expense automation in the late 1990s and 2000 time frame," Curatolo said. "At that point in time, we were both ahead of the game. It has taken time for the processes to mature, data to become enhanced and people to think about travel on a global basis with a mindset of cost-efficiency. This is not something that just popped up in the last two months here."