WorldTravel Meetings & Incentives has ceased developing its meetings technology product, Plan2Attend, officials said, and last month signed an agreement to use and offer products from meetings technology provider StarCite Inc.
Through the partnership, WTMI will use StarCite's meetings management technology internally and distribute the technology to its customers, according to WTMI president Scott Graf. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
Chicago-based WTMI is the meetings management arm of Atlanta-based WorldTravel BTI.
"We'll not only use StarCite to power our business, but we will promote it as a good solution in the marketplace," Graf said. "One thing to note is, while we certainly have a strategic partnership and preferred relationship with StarCite, we use the term 'we'll pray in all churches' when it comes to technology. If a customer wants to work with WTMI but is clearly focused on another meetings tool, we will definitely use another tool for that customer."
Plan2Attend is "no longer for sale," WTMI's Graf said, and the 15 customers currently using the product will transition to StarCite technology over the next six months. The decision to end Plan2Attend was based on the expense of keeping the tool up-to-date, especially as dedicated meetings technology companies received new rounds of investment and planned aggressive development, he said.
"StarCite is a meetings technology company, period. We're a meeting, event and incentive company that happened to be in the technology business as well. Frankly, this a very good thing for us in terms of the resources and investment dollars available to us that can be better used in more strategic areas," Graf said.
The StarCite and WTMI partnership makes sense as meetings technology advances to the point that millions of dollars and other resources are necessary for a product to remain competitive, said Corbin Ball, president of Bellingham, Wash.-based consulting firm Corbin Ball Associates.
"It takes a pretty heavy platform to be able to do these enterprise installations. It's not surprising that people are consolidating forces to be able to capture this high-end market," Ball said. "WTMI is not a software company, they're a travel company. It makes sense to outsource things that are not in your core functionality."
Still, as such tech heavyweights as StarCite and Santa Clara, Calif.-based OnVantage push end-to-end solutions for multinational companies, market space still exists for turnkey meetings technology solutions, Ball said, and all technology companies in the market are pursuing that business.
WTMI first launched Plan2Attend in March 2003
(Meetings Today, March 24, 2003) as a replacement for a previous meetings tool, called MeetingAssist. Clients of the Plan2Attend tool include Bank of America.
Dana Catchpole, former vice president and supplier manager for meeting and event management at BOA, last year said the bank was looking to integrate a group online booking tool but that they hadn't found an appropriate product
(Meetings Today, Jan. 17, 2005).Graf said customers will receive an immediate upgrade with the transition to StarCite technology. "We are saying to customers that you will get the following additional features and new functionality, the online marketplace, the electronic RFP database, integration with the booking tools at no incremental cost to the customers," he said.
WTMI's technology team, led by vice president of meetings technology Mike Malinchok
(Meetings Today, Dec. 6, 2004), already have begun to work with StarCite developers to share information and resources.
"I'd like to see some type of quarterly formalized process where we review, as any customer would, what we like, where we would like to see improvement, and what we're hearing from our customers in terms of influencing development timelines," Graf said.
Graf said the agreement was reached in early January. Mike Boult, president and CEO of StarCite, said WTMI evaluated all available tools during the six-month bidding process.
"Culturally, we are very similar organizations, and that was a big deciding factor for us," Graf said. "There's several tools on the market that are quite good, but for us, finding that right blend of people who understand our business, want to embrace our philosophies and want to listen to our feedback proactively was extremely important in our decision-making process. You can imagine, being the owners of technology, the very thorough research and request-for-proposal process that we went through. It was an exhaustive process for us, and the evaluation we made was a clear and distinct decision to StarCite."
It is too early to tell what features of Plan2Attend, if any, may be adopted into the StarCite product, said John Pino, founder and executive chairman of Philadelphia-based StarCite.
"We're trying to get our technology out into the customers first and then see what, if anything, is lacking or needs to be improved. That process will be ongoing," Pino said.
"As we go forward, obviously because of their role in strategic meetings management, they have a unique view of what customers want and need and it augments our view that we have today," Pino said.
Both WTMI and StarCite have launched aggressive multinational growth plans, finding partnerships overseas and new customer bases. The agreement between the two companies is global, Pino said, and StarCite anticipates serving as the technology platform for WTMI worldwide.
"They're going to make us a better company. There's no doubt in my mind," Boult said. "They have strong ideas and input about where the technology should go and how we can best support their business."