Two stalwarts of the meetings technology industry, SeeUthere Technologies and PlanSoft Inc., today announced their merger, effective immediately, into a new company called OnVantage and headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif.
The new company is split into two divisions. One, operating out of SeeUthere's Santa Clara base will focus on serving corporate clients. The other will concentrate on the supplier market and operate out of PlanSoft's Twinsburg, Ohio, home.
Officials of the new company said the merger was a natural fit. "Both companies had similar approaches to the market, with PlanSoft placing a greater emphasis on suppliers and SeeUthere with greater penetration into the corporate market," said PlanSoft chairman and CEO David Hunt, who will serve as OnVantage chairman.
The deal, an all-stock transaction, was billed as a merger of equals. "It's a 50/50 transaction, every letter and every number," said PlanSoft president Ed Tromczynski, who now is the president of the OnVantage supplier division.
SeeUthere CEO and president John Chang will serve as OnVantage CEO. The new company's corporate division is led by SeeUthere COO Stanley Chin.
Chang said SeeUthere corporate customers will benefit from the greater spend management and data control the integration of PlanSoft's database of hotels and other suppliers, allowing corporations to more extensively deploy meeting policies regarding site selection and better capture historic spending data from properties.
Integration will proceed quickly, Chang said, with some expected "in a matter of weeks."
Though both companies offer meetings consolidation tools, Chang said no customer uses both. Tromczynski said current corporate users of PlanSoft's Meeting Management Services consolidation tools may continue to use them or transition to SeeUthere's MeetingView. OnVantage's corporate division will present MeetingView as its meetings consolidation product.
The move is but the latest in the long-predicted wave of consolidation to sweep the industry, with casualties including Event411.com and EventSource's ProcurePoint incarnation, acquisitions including StarCite Inc.'s purchase of B-there and GetThere's decision to cease offering its DirectMeetings tool as a separate product.
PlanSoft gained prominence in 1997 when it launched a virtual site-inspection tool, well funded by Hyatt, Marriott, Sheraton, the American Society of Association Executives and Meeting Professionals International. After an aborted 1998 attempt to market desktop software that meeting planning and electronic request for proposal tools, PlanSoft shifted its tools to the Internet
(Meetings Today, Feb. 21, 2000), creating a vast, searchable database of hotels and other suppliers it eventually would call Mpoint. The firm then faced new competition for the limited number, at that time, of meeting planners and buyers ready to transition their work to the Web. PlanSoft first responded by launching a suite of meetings consolidation tools, but was hampered by its lack of an in-house online registration capability, which had proven to be the most popular meetings technology. The company in 2003 remedied that with the introduction of its Qreg registration service
(Meetings Today, July 7, 2003). The company's current corporate clients include Northern Trust Corp. and York International Corp., third-party giants Conferon and ConferenceDirect distribute its MMS tools and several hotel chains have integrated PlanSoft search functionality into their Web sites.
SeeUthere debuted in 1998 as an online event promotion firm, gradually transitioned to a major player in online corporate meeting registration. Long touting itself as willing to partner with other travel and meeting technology firms, SeeUthere allied with transient self-booking tools from TRX, Travelport and, eventually, GetThere
(Meetings Today, Aug. 2).