B-There Inks Two Deals To Connect IT, RFP Functions
<B>B-There Inks Two Deals To Connect IT, RFP Functions</B>
By Chris Davis
In a $19 million deal designed to increase and streamline the site's booking functionalities and beef up security measures, attendee-management Web site B-there.com has signed information technology firm Keane Inc. to provide total IT capabilities.
In a separate move, B-there.com also formed a partnership with meeting portal AllMeetings.com that allows corporate customers with either site's functionality on their intranets to link to the other site's offerings.
The Keane deal is actually an extension and revision of a previous relationship, as the IT firm now holds an equity position and a number of stock options, pending a seemingly inevitable B-there initial public offering of stock.
The deal is driven by Westport, Conn.-based B-there's attempts to increase its technological capability to provide real-time booking options for meetings and group air, ground and other suppliers in addition to its core business of booking attendee hotel rooms. The site already has signed one pact with Worldspan and Datalex to provide air bookings at negotiated corporate rates (Meetings Today, Sept. 20, 1999), and B-there CEO Peggy Lee said more deals with other global distribution systems are pending.
Keane will upgrade B-there's Event Reservation and Registration System engine to handle more users and broader functionality, and will integrate it with several GDSs and individual supplier sites, Lee said.
Lee also hopes the plan will lend heft to B-there's attempts to provide online booking solutions on meetings and travel pages of corporate intranets.
"Keane understands the corporate IT culture on the front end and on the back end," she said. "Unlike a lot of dot-coms, they deal with corporate structure and culture every day. It helps to streamline the implementation of B-there into a corporate structure."
As attendee-management sites grow, they're finding that the technological capabilities needed to seamlessly provide real-time bookings or integration with hotels' property management systems can be a complex and expensive process, said Roger Paradis, CEO of Quincy, Mass.-based site Passkey.com, a B-there rival.
"Anyone can build a Web site and even a basic reservation system," Paradis said. "But it's fundamentally different to provide a comprehensive level of security along with functionality that can process the entire inventory. It's an expensive proposition, and I think that's what they're looking at now."
Passkey primarily handles its IT needs in-house. The site also has linked up with Sabre and Pegasus, as well as PlanSoft, to provide a variety of site-search and group booking possibilities (Meetings Today, Aug. 2, 1999).
While security may not be the driving force behind the deal, B-there president John Golicz said Keane's reputation will bolster his site's as well.
"We know people are concerned about security," Golicz said. "But we have a lot of institutional backers, which we think helps people understand we're not some fly-by-night operation. Any additional functionality is assured to be ready to use and bulletproof."
The AllMeetings partnership, made earlier this month, allows corporate meeting planners to use AllMeetings' site-selection and RFP services and B-there's attendee-booking and budget reconciliation tools from their intranets. It continues a spate of new partnerships between industry
"In the past, AllMeetings.com's corporate customers could use our service to prepare a budget for a meeting, but they had to wait until all of the attendees turned in their expenses to determine actual expenditures," said Henderson, Nev.-based AllMeetings CEO Glenn Bingham. No money changes hands in the partnership.
Meanwhile, Twinsburg, Ohio-based meeting portal PlanSoft also is looking to form strategic alliances , and it has hired Rosenbluth International veteran David Fisher as vice president of emerging markets to facilitate that. Fisher is charged with seeking alliances with global distribution systems and other industry intermediaries. Fisher spent 22 years with Rosenbluth, including stints as CFO and vice president of finance overseeing mergers and acquisitions. ''Under Dave's direction, we will aggressively seek new partners to help strengthen our end-to-end online product offering for the corporate market,'' said PlanSoft CEO David Hunt.