Vendors Take Tech To NBTA

<B> Vendors Take Tech To NBTA</B>
<I>Booking, Expense Tools Show Latest Turns On Floor</I>

By Mary Ann McNulty


<I>Minneapolis</I> - Touting new names and products, partnerships and speedy implementation tactics, booking and expense vendors promise to overwhelm travel decision makers trying to keep up with the latest developments at the National Business Travel Association's annual gathering here this week.

Corporate booking vendor Internet Travel Network, Palo Alto, Calif., will debut its new corporate name, GetThere.com. The change was made both to focus on the online business-to-business travel services it's offering and extend its reach around the globe under a single name. The company found it couldn't use the ITN name in Europe.

Xtra On-Line Corp., Dallas, will showcase the new user interface that all PowerTrip.com customers will receive by the end of the month that eliminates 40 percent of the mouse clicks previously required to book a reservation.

"We bundled up some of the tasks in the trip building process, reducing the number of reservation screen links found on the navigation bar from 10 to six," said Mark McCulloch, vice president of product development. "After logging in, it's virtually a 1-2-3 step process to book a regularly taken business trip."

Xtra also will announce plans to extend its relationship with On The Go Software to integrate Xtra's booking tool with the Web-based ExpensAble.com expense application, thus offering a more robust integrated solution by Q1 2000. PowerTrip is compatible with the Quicken Expensable '98.

Sabre Business Travel Solutions will highlight its latest enhancements, also designed to make it easier, faster and more intuitive for travelers to book a reservation. In the spring release that most customers now are receiving, BTS made a "50 percent reduction in the back-and-forth" communication between the host and user, said Pete Stephens, recently promoted to vice president of business development for BTS. Sabre also is giving its corporate customers more flexibility in balancing speed against security concerns. For those who wish to speed up transactions, BTS now can turn off all but crucial encryptions of sensitive personal data. Others can continue to encrypt more, sacrificing speed.

Another major area of focus for BTS enhancements, Stephens said, has been on profile synchronization and a new corporate data synchronization that allows companies to sync corporate card, human resources or any other data elements stored in the profile.

Finally, BTS will be showcasing the content that it has gradually been adding through relationships with 10 separate providers. Destination information on restaurants, trade shows, weather and even current events are now among the options that travelers can access.

Worldspan is announcing a new partnership with Citicorp Diners Club in which the card vendor will recommend its Trip Manager self-booking tool to card customers. Worldspan also said Delta Air Lines, which owns part of Worldspan, has signed on to use Trip Manager for its business travel.

On the expense side, making its debut at NBTA will be Solix Internet Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., which is offering a turnkey enterprise operations management solution to streamline expense reimbursement, accounting, purchasing, human resources and other functions. Travel expense is the first module, with several others expected in coming months, according to Veena Gundavelli, president of the start-up unit of Solix Group, a four-year-old full-service provider of enterprise resource planning solutions to Fortune 2000 companies like Cisco Systems, Motorola and Sony. The company also released the application architecture that serves as the framework for all modules. It is a Java-based solution that consists of business process modeling, policy enforcement, workflow routing and adapters that ease integration with legacy IT infrastructures.

Besides its strategy to offer a suite of products to solve operations management challenges, Solix Internet is striving to use its knowledge of ERP systems and integration to differentiate itself from competing OMS providers, such as Ariba, Concur and even the ERP vendors themselves, but also those offering only expense solutions. Some expense vendors are promising implementation within two months, Solix's Gundavelli said, but most often this doesn't include integration to the ERP system, which takes another couple of months.

One of the vendors that will be highlighting its speedy implementation of two customers, FMC and Owens-Corning, will be Value Integrated Network, Barrington, Ill. Both customers were able to deploy the service bureau expense option within four to six weeks, according to a Vin.net spokesman.

Meanwhile, the original author of Vin.net's TravelMaster, Richard Roche Sr., now president of InterCoastal Software, Westford, Mass., said his new company will support the old product through a new Consulting and Programming Group. Support available to TravelMaster users includes annual service agreements, programming services for system modifications and enhancements, and full competitive upgrade allowances for upgrading to a new version of ICS' After 4.0 for Windows 9x/NT and converting all files.

The new version of After 4.0 is a 32-bit application designed for companies with up to 10,000 travelers. Employees can create an expense report on any PC, on the network or remotely, and submit it. After 4.0 is used by more than 75 companies including Lockheed Martin Financial Corp., Ericsson Research Canada, Oppenheimer Capital, Marconi Systems Technologies, Mary Kay Cosmetics and Fairchild Missile Systems.