Mtgs. Tech Vendors Shift To Net Portals

<B>Mtgs. Tech Vendors Shift To Net Portals</B>

By Chris Davis

Reflecting the rising tide of Internet-based technology solutions, meetings technology purveyors PlanSoft Corp. and StarCite Inc. have shifted their principal focus from providing software to Internet portals.

Having spent most of the past year making the conversion, the meetings technology leaders effectively have placed their bets on public Internet portals capable of facility searches sending online RFPs as the tool most useful for planners, rather than desktop software.

While the development of Web-based meetings technology still is too embryonic to judge whether they're right, some buyers agree that the two companies are on the right path. "The solution to many of my challenges lies in Web-based technology," said Rich Del Colle, Burlington, Mass.-based meetings program manager for Hewlett-Packard. "This is the way the industry is going."

H-P has a decentralized meetings program, with more than 1,000 employees worldwide planning meetings in some form. "We have over 100,000 people with a desktop or laptop computer, all of whom have access to the Web," Del Colle said. "Providing a desktop software solution would mean identifying who among them is planning meetings and paying for those services."

Other planners in corporations not as decentralized or proactive as H-P take more of a wait-and-see approach. "I don't currently use any technology, but I'm planing to use it more," said Martha Gorman, corporate meeting planner with Philadelphia-based Towers Perrin. "I'm not necessarily biased against either form, however. I'd like the functionality to be specialized for Towers Perrin, but that costs more. It will all depend on cost and functionality."

Despite that, PlanSoft and StarCite are confident most planners will look to the Internet to meet their technological needs.

PlanSoft, based in Twinsburg, Ohio, began in 1991 with the goal of developing software to connect buyer and hotel and allow the two to create the terms of a meeting online. Years in development, the Ajenis software debuted in late 1998, but less than a year later PlanSoft had split its Web site into three separate sites for planners, hoteliers and other suppliers and touted the PlanSoft Network as the premier meeting portal.

While stressing that the Ajenis platform was built to eventually migrate to the Web, PlanSoft founder and president Ed Tromczynski said the development and explosion of popularity of the Internet meant his company had to react.

"Undoubtedly, the PlanSoft Network has been better and more easily adopted, as we now approach 14,000 registered members," Tromczynski said. "Adoption of Ajenis has been slower than we would have liked. We've already moved the hotel version to the Web, which is exciting, and a few hundred planners have been through the full Ajenis training and given feedback. As it moves to the Web, it will take off as well."

The development of high-speed Internet access lines, said Tromczynski, has pushed PlanSoft to develop tools that can be accessed and used quickly. "The Internet is getting better, and that's what's driving us," Tromczynski said. "What kills everyone selling software tools is trying to keep all versions up to date and coordinated. With the Web, though, you can just dial in and get the most powerful stuff."

StarCite began in January 1999 as a spinoff of Philadelphia-based McGettigan Partners focused on selling its proprietary meetings consolidation software, CORE Discovery, on the open market. Between January and its November launch, StarCite was reborn as a Web portal with a wide array of tools for the corporate planner, including the ability to construct a password-protected corporate page on the site.

"We're like a GDS, but we're an MDS, a meetings distribution system," said StarCite president John Lavin. "Our goal is to sign up planners, like Sabre signed up travel agents," at no cost, while suppliers pay a transaction fee per room night for business the site generates.

Distribution deals with Maritz Inc. and McGettigan guaranteed the site a million room nights before a single corporate customer signed on. "Our initial philosophy was a combination of client-server technology and a Web site to refresh the client-server site, but we flipped that midyear," said John Pino, CEO of both McGettigan and StarCite. "We responded to what customers were saying--it had to be a Web-based solution."

Upon the initial announcement of the creation of StarCite (<I>Meetings Today</I>, Jan. 25, 1999), the startup often was compared with Dallas-based Travel Technologies Group, which was formed in 1988 to sell meetings software developed by WorldTravel Partners.

TTG, which produces Meeting Partner and Meeting Assist software, has monitored StarCite's changing structure. TTG's vice president of product development Luther Pawling said it won't change his company's future outlook."We remain convinced that technology at the minute is not sufficiently advanced for professional planners to achieve their goals over a pure Web-based application," Pawling said. "It's just not fast enough yet. I have no doubt that it will get there, but not in the next couple of years."

TTG is developing new software that further interfaces with the Web, Pawling said, "to corner the whole life cycle of a meeting--site selection, costing, registration, reports and consolidation of data."

Some smaller software providers see the recent industry moves as the harbinger of business opportunities. Oakland, N.J.-based Isis Corp., which produces The Gold System software--known for its ability to link to GDSs to book corporate group airfare at negotiated rates--is exploring options to partner with one or more of the large facility-search sites, said director of marketing Jay Reilly. "We will eventually partner with some or all of those guys, since they want to get the transactions and the RFPs, while we're looking more at the data. The planner could create a meeting in Gold, directly hit one of these sites and the data could come back into Gold. If these sites don't want to become software companies, we can become the technology engines for them."

But the meeting portal market grows more crowded every day, with PlanSoft and StarCite joined by providers such as EventSource.com and allmeetings.com. Brian Langer, co-founder and vice president of business development at EventSource, said his company has been strictly Web-focused from its first day, giving it an advantage. "These companies that are changing from a license to a transaction service model have a conflicting strategy problem, and it's a real challenge to reinvent yourself and change your revenue model," Langer said. "It gives us an advantage. I don't know if it hurts them, but it helps us.