StarCite president and CEO Michael Boult last month spoke with meetings management editor Elissa Hunter about the meetings technology provider's recently announced partnerships, future plans, the progress of meeting benchmarking data and future marketplace trends.Meetings Today: Recently, you've announced partnerships with Orbitz, American Express and Pegasus. Why all the collaborations and why now?
Michael Boult: Each one of them is quite different. We've always had a history of working with other partners to fill out our solution. I don't think we've ever had it in our mind to build the complete corporate and supply-side integrated ecosystem. StarCite has collaborated with online booking tools and travel management companies and meeting management companies since the beginning of time, so this isn't anything new.
MT: Why did you choose these partners in particular?
Boult: Orbitz for Business has a number of customers asking to provide support for their meetings and events, and we have a couple that have Orbitz for Business as their travel partner, so it makes sense. We've had integrations with people like Cliqbook and GetThere, so this is another company to add to that portfolio.
Pegasus is quite different. On the supply side, it's a complicated business in the sense that there are multiple systems—even multiple systems within one brand because of mergers, acquisitions and consolidation. That's a challenge for the industry to transact. If you want real-time booking, transactions and shopping, then you have to do something about how you integrate systems together. On the hotel side, that has been extremely difficult for a couple of decades, so we're looking for integration partners who can help us reach a broad set of suppliers with one solution. Most of the world's large brands and many of the independent hotels have selected Pegasus to provide them with some level of integration. This will allow us, over time, to transact with those suppliers outside of what has historically been a quite cumbersome e-RFP process.
American Express is a completely different animal. The meeting card product has a very high share of the corporate marketplace—I think 70 percent of the Fortune 500 use American Express, and those are exactly our same customers. They came to us and American Express and said, "There's got to be a better way to do this. We use StarCite as the platform to manage our meetings, and American Express as a card to pay for these meetings, but the reconciliation process is very manual and very inefficient." It might take a planner a couple of weeks to close out a large, complex meeting and verify all charges, get everybody paid, send all the items back to all the project owners and business users responsible for the fees.
MT: When will these products debut?
Boult: We are working with Pegasus for release in the first quarter, same with Orbitz. American Express will be the first solution to hit the market on Nov. 30. We have four customers that are signed up to use that product.
MT: Will there be opportunities for further integration with transient online booking tools?
Boult: We have GetThere, we have Cliqbook and we have announced this relationship with Orbitz. They're certainly not the last. We're having active conversations with a large European supplier and another U.S. domestic supplier. If our customers like and want to utilize those tools in conjunction with StarCite, I'm pretty sure that over time, we will integrate them.
MT: Could other technology, such as expense reporting, be wrapped in?
Boult: I don't see why not. Expense reporting on the meetings side is quite different from transient. We think American Express, given its share of the market and the products and services it has, is definitely right for StarCite.
MT: What is the status of the OnVantage integration
(Meetings Today, Aug. 14, 2006)?Boult: It's ongoing. We just released our Group Lead Center, which is our supply-side product, so we now have a single place for suppliers to check and respond to all RFPs, versus going to an OnVantage product and a StarCite product. We don't want hotel salespeople to have to go to multiple places. We want them to have an easy and complete process. We continue to migrate customers to our new Go Forward platform. We have a large attendee release next week and a large spend-management release that happens the end of November. At that point, all the systems are lined up and all the products have been built for full migration of all customers, but we're doing it in stages. There's lots of data to migrate and a lot of things to consider: training, thousands of planners and tens of thousands of suppliers. It's a big effort, but we're pleased with the process and the progress.
MT: What is the potential for future acquisitions?
Boult: We don't have any plans to date. We think organic opportunities—new products, more transactions with existing customers, new logos, new geography, new partnerships—will get us where we need to be over the next three years. We've looked at what else is out there that would be complementary and beneficial, but it's a very short list.
MT: Is there any particular aspect of meetings tech that you're looking at?
Boult: The largest events are very interesting to us—the largest trade shows and product launches that possibly our product had not been perfect for. We can and will make improvements in that area. Our technology has been poor for the smallest meetings of 50 people or less. I think people have used our solution because there simply hasn't been anything else on the market for that. It represents 70 percent of the market and we are going to attack that with vigor. More activity in Europe and Asia/Pacific is in the cards for us.
MT: How do you see current meetings tech trends?
Boult: We see, just in our own growth, an uptick in interest. We've seen an increase in the length, size and globality of contracts. We've seen more people care about smaller meetings. We've seen a good deal of focus on the compliance elements of meetings, and to different reports around the likely increases in meetings cost. People want to understand how they can leverage their spend and not pay the 8 percent to 20 percent increases forecasted by some consulting companies.
We just launched a benchmarking initiative
(Meetings Today, July 23) to provide science for companies who have yet to put their toe in the water, to give them real, not anecdotal, information about the value of doing this—all the places they can save, what other companies have done and are doing to improve—so they can judge for themselves where they are in the process. There's really no good data that exists in the meeting space, so we decided to create it. We've gotten 45 very solid data points. Companies have given us everything they're doing and everything they're not doing. From that, across multiple industries, we're reporting trends to initial customers.