ERP Business Portals Target Travel In New Applications
<B> ERP Business Portals Target Travel In New Applications</B>
By Mary Ann McNulty
Travel booking and expense reporting applications were among the first corporate portals recently rolled out by a slew of enterprise resource planning system vendors, including Concur, Hewlett-Packard, PeopleSoft, SAP and Solix Internet Inc.
Business portals have been receiving enormous attention in the information technology and corporate worlds, where vendors are focusing on integrating and automating business tasks over corporate intranets. Only time will tell whether the products live up to the promises in this next stage of enterprise resource planning applications. But in the meantime, the ERPs are dangling travel applications, hoping they provide enough of a lure to convince customers to jump in and deploy enterprise applications.
Currently, just 18.9 percent of organizations have ERP software in place, and another 34.1 percent are researching, piloting or implementing ERP software, according to Computer Economics' annual Information Systems and eBusiness Spending study released in June.
Concur Technologies, which in May acquired Seeker Software, plans to integrate Seeker's Web-based employee self-service applications into its existing expense and purchasing offerings. Concur's fully integrated EmployeeDesktop is slated for release within six months, but president and CEO Steve Singh contended that the acquisition already makes Concur the first to offer a comprehensive workplace automation and transaction processing suite that combines travel expense management, e-commerce and human resources self-service solutions. With the acquisition, at least one Concur product will sit on the desktops of 1.5 million employees in 225 corporations.
That lead isn't expected to be long-lived, however, as PeopleSoft Business Network in November plans to release its employee portal, which will offer expense, human resources and finance functions, and integration with Sabre's Business Travel Solutions as well. BTS is just one corporate booking option PeopleSoft will offer, said product specialist Nancy Bremer, and three other companies already are beta testing the network.
For its part, Sabre became a charter merchant in the PeopleSoft Business Network in an attempt to garner more business, perhaps 50 to 100 new customers, said Pete Stephens, BTS managing director of marketing and business development. PeopleSoft's approach "is different in that it is highly focused on the employee," he said. "The key to making any of these successful is interaction with the individual."
Competing ERP vendors SAP, Oracle and J.D. Edwards also have announced portal strategies, all of which include travel applications. SAP has long had an expense application as part of its client-server human resources offering, but recently redesigned that, moved the menus into finance and added a travel booking product that it jointly developed with Amadeus. Customers began receiving SAP Travel Planning with deliveries in April, though SAP will start marketing the free add-on as an enhanced version included in its fall release. In the new release, the booking application will take on a less utilitarian look than in the current version, officials said.
Travel expense software also is one of the first applications that newcomer Solix Internet Inc. will release later this year as part of an enterprise operations management solutions suite it will not only develop, but also implement within corporations. A spinoff of ERP consultancy Solix Systems Inc., the Internet arm was founded in early 1998.
Outlining its vision for a new generation of electronic services and a technology designed to enable e-service vendors to spontaneously interact with one another using its new e-speak technology, Hewlett-Packard has signed up its own stable of merchant participants, including Internet Travel Network, Palo Alto, Calif. As part of the H-P developments, a host of companies announced plans to create a range of e-services, from storage and software delivered on a pay-as-you-go basis to travel e-services that automatically rebook tickets and update itineraries. In a strategy briefing, H-P executives outlined three trends that are driving the e-services marketplace:
* The rise of "apps on tap," business applications delivered as pay-as-you-go services on the Net, enabling companies to drive down IT costs. Companies can focus on building and deploying the applications that are uniquely strategic to their business and "rent" virtually everything else as apps on tap.
* An explosion of next-generation, industry-specific, application-specific and company-specific portals that offer a collection of complementary third-party services providing tight links between services. For example, an Internet-based calendar service might be linked to a pager service to notify users when appointments are changed.
* The emergence of a "dynamically brokered" e-services marketplace, where requests for services are automatically brokered, bid and transacted on the Net on the requestor's behalf based on specified criteria, such as best price, most reliable, highest quality and so on.
For Concur, the acquisition of Seeker is part of the strategy it outlined last summer, when it changed its name from Portable Software and acquired 7th Software's purchasing applications to create a portal for employees. The company studied the products of 20 companies before negotiating with Seeker, Singh said. Next, it likely will seek a time and billing application to add to the suite, while it continues to seek out other must-have applications.
On booking, Concur's strategy is to partner with existing players, based on the expressed needs of its customers, who have the final say in deciding which booking system to integrate, said products vice president Raj Singh. Concur has ongoing relationships with "ITN, Sabre, Amex, Worldspan, the list goes on," he said.
No doubt Concur will be talking to the five large corporations who currently have both its products and Seeker's about what else they need. The companies are Abbott Labs, Baxter Healthcare, BellSouth, Dell Computers and Sprint.