Sabre BTS, Trilogy To Meld E-Booking, Purchasing
<B> Sabre BTS, Trilogy To Meld E-Booking, Purchasing</B>
By Mary Ann McNulty
Capitalizing on the emerging boom in electronic commerce, Sabre Business Travel Solutions and Trilogy plan to integrate their respective travel booking and purchasing applications, offering a comprehensive, one-stop shopping site that small- to medium-sized businesses can afford. Last month, Sabre announced a similar alliance with Commerce One, a procurement application aimed at much larger corporations.
Austin, Texas-based Trilogy offers a low-cost, Web-based application called Buying Chain, designed for the 5 million businesses that employ 5,000 or fewer people. That market, into which one-fourth of BTS's more than 200 corporate users fit, typically has less than $10 million in annual travel and entertainment spend, said BTS director of marketing and business planning Pete Stevens.
Buying Chain debuted last fall, with a list price of $995 for 50 users. More than 2,000 corporations already have purchased the application. Most often installed on corporate intranets, it incorporates approval routings, corporate standards and reporting into one online buying package, offering administrative savings of up to 55 percent. Trilogy has designed the product to allow corporations to customize it with their own preferred vendors. In this new model of e-commerce, Trilogy encourages corporations to download the software from its Web site, www.buyingchain.com, and try it free of cost for 30 days.
In the integrated product, Sabre intends to establish a generic policy and pre-set all configurations in much the same way, almost creating a shrink-wrapped application. While corporate users are free to customize BTS, Stevens said, the integrated version will be ready to use on day one. Trilogy expects to ship the integrated version this summer. At press time, pricing details were not available.
Stevens declined to reveal other vendors or segments that Sabre has identified for potential alliances, saying, "Our interest is to be involved in travel where we can add value. We have to play where our customers want to play.