<H1>Andersen Joins Game</H1>by Cheryl Rosen
<I>Minneapolis </I>- Andersen Consulting will launch a new business in the next few months: a limited-liability corporation called Via World Network that will be charged with reengineering the way travel is booked, processed, accounted and paid for.
The Network's first product-an automated booking and expense reporting system accessible by telephone, computer or Internet-will begin beta testing internally at Andersen Consulting this fall, with a general release to the corporate market scheduled for the first quarter of next year. But Andersen is stressing that the corporate system is only a small piece of the overall mission of Via World Network, which is to essentially rebuild the travel industry infrastructure.
Even while trying to maintain a low profile until the business is ready to launch, Andersen confirmed at a travel distribution conference in Boston last week that its goal is to "transform the industry by delivering a radically new process and removing cost as well as complexity from travel product distribution." The plan is to build a single unified system to handle trip planning, booking, financial transfers, airport processes, airline revenue accounting, corporate expense reporting and reporting to other segments of the industry.
Based in Minneapolis, the Via World Network will be the third company started by Andersen's recently formed Enterprise Area. While Andersen Consulting's mission is to help individual companies succeed, the Enterprise Area is charged with helping entire industries compete more successfully by rebuilding and modernizing their infrastructures.
Via World Network will be the Enterprise group's third business, joining Utiligent, a customer service system for the utilities industry; and ServiceNet, a joint venture with BBN begun in July, which is creating a new platform for electronic commerce. Elmer Baldwin will be president and chief executive of Via World Network.
Andersen spokeswoman Regina Hoffman, who was recruited from Rosenbluth International in February to join the new group, said its vision is to "completely reinvent everything that goes on behind the scenes in the travel industry-from airline processing to corporate payment systems-and the booking piece is just one component of that much bigger mission." She said Anderson would not be ready to provide further details for at least another month.
The Via World Network system will use the latest Java language, and new cutting-edge products coming out of Sun Microsystems that are not yet available to the general market.
"Clearly, the point here is to sidestep both ARC and the CRS," said travel technology consultant Richard Eastman, president of the Eastman Group, Newport Beach, Calif. "The entire distribution channel is going to change as companies create new path dependencies."
Eastman said his company also is building a product to bypass ARC and CRSs. "Andersen has done a lot of airline work, and they have a lot of inside information which will help them understand how to bypass ARC, but they have very limited distribution experience," he said. "When you cut through the chaff, the Andersen solution is just a different approach to what American Express and Worldspan and Microsoft are building-and it's little different from what Sabre is building in its BTS/EDI settlement solution.