Prism Launches Windows-Based Workstation

<I>Albuquerque, N. M. </I>- A new version of the Prism Group's Travel Manager's Workstation debuted this month, with a Microsoft NT server replacing its traditional OS/2 platform, an Electronic Information System that allows for drill-down graphs, and a dial-in service that travel managers and agents can use to access live data and produce ad hoc reports at their desks.

The change in architecture to the Microsoft standard will allow a more user-friendly, Windows-based front end and make it simpler to network the Workstation with other corporate hardware and software.

The 10-year-old Travel Manager's Workstation is a reporting system that allows travel managers and their agencies to consolidate travel data from various sources, convert segment data from the airlines into usable origin and destination information, and produce pre-formatted or ad hoc graphs on travel patterns. Its customer base includes about 60 travel managers, among them 28 of the Fortune 100, four of the Big Six accounting firms and 60 agencies. In August, Prism signed an exclusive deal to provide the Travel Manager's Workstation as the reporting module for Sabre's Business Travel Solutions.

Under the agreement with Sabre, BTS will be the sole distributor of the Workstation to travel managers. But Prism will continue to sell the system to agents as Agency Server, and to offer a travel-reporting service bureau to corporate clients, handling their data collection and reporting on an outsourced basis, said Prism vice president Les Baker.

Prism has already signed one outsourcing contract, with British Airways, under which it will track the market share of BA customers in the Partners Program. "The airlines have all these market share deals with corporate customers, but the data they have has been very muddy," Baker said.