Tech Players Team For Full Solutions

<H1> Tech Players Team For Full Solutions</H1> By Cheryl Rosen

Spurred, no doubt, by the looming deadline presented by next week's National Business Travel Association conference in Dallas, the travel technology industry has been spending its summer cementing partnerships and signing deals.

American Express just signed a two-year agreement with Microsoft; Sabre will be pairing its Business Travel Solutions booking product with Portable Software's QuickXpense and two more soon-to-be-named expense reporting systems; super-regional agency TravelOne of Mt. Laurel, N.J., will bundle its ExpenseOne with Concord, Mass.-based E-Travel Inc.'s booking system; and WorldTravel Partner's Travel Technologies Group has an agreement to hand data from its ResAssist 96 (see story, Page 4) to GE Capital MasterCard and on to QuickXpense.

Even as the development teams are forming, the early-adopter customers are beginning to choose up sides as well. Sabre has announced its first three BTS customers-Digital Equipment Corp., First Data Card Services Group and Cap Gemini. E-Travel has signed a New England-based financial services company that industry insiders identify as Fidelity Investments.

First Data corporate travel manager Gary Mixan said that getting into the loop early "by hooking up with Sabre at last year's NBTA conference and working with them ever since" has helped produce "a product that we feel has been customized to our needs."

Charged by his boss, director of financial controls Richard Severson, with finding an automated booking system, Mixan said he was disappointed that no one at last year's NBTA show had a product ready to unveil. His response was to "begin exploring the options we read about in<I> Business Travel News'</I> Automation Directory, and talk to the vendors. We looked at about a dozen systems, got serious about six and decided to go with BTS because we felt that by partnering with a CRS, we were going to the source of the data."

As an early participant in the process, Mixan felt that he helped influence the final product in a much more direct way than future customers will be able to do.

"We have been saying that they need to have all the pieces-that they need to bring in the corporate card data to the T&E module and to provide that information to our employees," Mixan said. "We also need the ability to pull in budgeted travel data, so that at any point managers can look at what their budget is and see how much they have left. We also asked for reconciliation between the booked and the actual data that's hitting the corporate card, and to have an automated approval process on both the booking and the T&E components."

Satisfied that Sabre is listening, Mixan plans to beta test the automated booking module with 25 travelers, including frequent and infrequent travelers as well as travel arrangers, over the next six to eight weeks. At the same time, impatient for progress, Mixan will offer the American Express e-mail-based T&E Mail system to another group of First Data's 5,000 frequent travelers.

"We're looking at that as a product we can use now to get the ball rolling and build enthusiasm, but the plan is to move people to real time," Mixan said.

Through the fourth quarter, a pilot group of 100 First Data travelers will move onto BTS; if all goes well, a full rollout will come with the new year "to everyone that wants it-and if this thing works the way we have in mind, the majority of our travelers will want it," Mixan said.

At Cap Gemini, marketing and communications vice president Susan Morgan said the company, originally hired as consultants to the BTS project, liked it so much they decided to give it a try. In use by a group of consultants since mid-June, the system is "magnificent in improving our use of preferred vendors," Morgan said. "The decision to use BTS was our CFO's; we're not in this for traveler convenience, but for savings."

For the software firms, partnering offers benefits as well. "There are three markets that provide synergies here-bookings, credit cards and accounting systems," said Portable Software president Steve Singh. "We feel we have the best expense management solution, and we will partner with providers of the other pieces, with Sabre and Worldspan and Internet Travel Network, and with the GE Corporate Card and First Bank Visa and Diners Club. A growing number of customers want to automate the whole process, and they want best-of-breed solutions that are tied together."

Portable Software will focus on Sabre "because customers have asked us to work with them, and it's difficult to work with someone else at the same time." Under a three-year non-exclusive contract, Sabre will "essentially give us R&D dollars to develop an integrated product that will be available in the first quarter of 1997," Singh said.

Portable Software also is working with GE Corporate Card to allow mutual customers to prepopulate expense reports with card data, Singh said, and with accounting software companies to automate the flow of data into those systems on the back end.