Vendors Partner On Enhancements
<B>Vendors Partner On Enhancements</B>
In addition to the major product-related announcements at the National Business Travel Association convention by technology players (see story, page 1), other vendors in the booking, payment and agency technology arenas have announced a number of enhancements and partnerships.
Booking vendor T-Direct joined on a non-exclusive basis with TravelManagement.com to market and resell TravelManagement's TravelStat Web-based benchmarking service.
The service allows subscribers to anonymously compare costs and best practices with other U.S. companies, and to aggregate data by account size, industry type and/or geographic location. The company plans to expand the product globally by the end of the year.
In the world of electronic documents, Visa International and Netfish Technologies last week said Netfish software products would use Visa's XML Web specification to enhance business-to-business transactions (BTN, Feb 21).
"Netfish software enables a company to receive, transmit and store electronic documents in essentially any format," said Keiron Lynch, vice president for Visa International's commercial product platforms. "They are adopting Visa's XML invoice specification as their default invoice, which can be used by anyone procuring services from electronic providers to transfer invoice information, be it legs of travel or hotel folio data, back to the company."
Suppliers can send "enhanced data" contained in the invoice for payments made using a Visa product.
Netfish's XDI software suite, which includes XDI Server, XDI Client and XDI Process Hub, converts existing business documents into XML for transactions with business partners in formats such as SAP, Oracle and BAAN.
Meanwhile, travel reservation management and procurement company Cornerstone Information Services and tech vendor Ciber Inc. last week announced an alliance to serve the travel technology, procurement and distribution markets.
The partners formed a new Travel Practice division, which will assist customers with Internet-based travel procurement, and reservation and information management. The division this month began serving clients, including helping to Web-enable Galileo International's agency subscribers to allow travelers to check prices, reserve and book tickets. Agencies also use the technology to manage accounting, run quality control programs and generate customer reports.
Cornerstone recently upgraded its Web-based travel management reporting system, called IBank Travel Management.