McGettigan's Star-Cite Spinoff Taps Hotelier John Lavin

<B> McGettigan's Star-Cite Spinoff Taps Hotelier John Lavin</B>

By Chris Davis

Star-Cite Solutions, the McGettigan Partners spinoff created to sell its CORE Discovery meeting management software under the RealPlanner name, last month reached into the hospitality industry to name John Lavin as its new president and COO.

Lavin, having spent 18 years with Hyatt Hotels, has a strong background in hospitality industry technology. At Hyatt, he developed a computerized central database of space, rates and open dates. Two years ago he joined Doubletree Hotels Corp., which was acquired by Promus soon after. Most recently he served as Promus's national sales vice president.

Though Star-Cite's future direction has not fully crystallized, Lavin believes the industry knowledge of its parent company and executives will give it a leg up in the market.

"There's a huge demand from corporations to better understand meetings and consolidation, how they can gain leverage, and what their real potential and purchasing power is," he said. "I don't have the total picture of what that will mean for products and services in the future, but we will evolve things to help manage and serve that market."

<B><CENTER>Taking It To Corporations</CENTER></B>

RealPlanner has been launched in three versions to serve different volumes and levels of corporate meetings programs. Its most powerful version is designed to manage meeting logistics, cost and budgeting on a corporate intranet, while its desktop version is for a single corporate planner. The company hopes to sell 50 of the most robust version, the RealPlanner EN, by the end of 1999.

Unlike McGettigan, which uses the CORE Discovery software only for its meetings-consolidation clients, Star-Cite is free to sell its product to anybody, even rival agencies. Star-Cite, which is based in Philadelphia, will pitch RealPlanner primarily to the corporate market.

While several technology companies offer meetings products--either software, Web sites or a combination--Lavin said there is enough corporate demand to support another entry.

"There will be more companies coming into the market, because the tech side of the industry is still emerging and there's a huge market out there," he said. "Five years from now, we'll look back and say we never dreamed what would happen. There are multiple right answers, and that's what we grapple with."

Lavin believes the meetings technology market is still in its infancy, but will shake itself out in the coming couple of years, with a few dominant companies establishing themselves amid a wave of acquisition and consolidation.

A key component in Star-Cite's strategy will be the debut in a few months of a Web site with some sort of meeting planning applications tied very closely with the software. "One of the misconceptions out there is that you're either a software company or an Internet company. We want to have an integrated approach," Lavin said.

Lavin said the combination of hospitality and technology "is everything I want to do with my career. I feel like I've studied for 20 years to take this job.