<B> Worldspan In Partnership</B>
By Mary Ann McNulty
<I>Atlanta</I> - In yet another example of a partnership designed to offer customers one-stop shopping, Atlanta-based Worldspan and Firstwave Technologies Inc. are integrating their respective Web-based corporate booking and customer relationship management offerings.
Users of Firstwave's Netgain Sales soon will be able to click an icon to book or price a trip through Trip Manager, while viewing the sales opportunities of a potential client. More than 200 corporations currently use Trip Manager, a private label of Travel Technologies Group's ResAssist booking product that can be programmed with multiple travel policies, including separate rules for domestic and international travel. Firstwave Technologies Inc. likewise reports more than 200 corporations, with 20,000 users.
A next-generation sales automation tool, Netgain Sales is Web-based, allowing it to easily integrate various informational sources that can help with the sales process, including maps, weather, statistics, etc. And company executives can easily update inventory, sales and company data files. To support users who work remotely or dial in, Netgain Sales can be used offline with automatic synchronization when they connect.
The alliance with Trip Manager is another advantage the recently announced Internet portal provides for Netgain users, said Firstwave director of architecture and technology Dale Gonzalez, giving sales professionals another tool to manage their time, contacts and customer relations.
At press time, company officials had not yet hammered out the pricing details, though they said the integrated product should be ready for a second-quarter release. Under the agreement, Firstwave will distribute Trip Manager to its own sales force and other company travelers.
The strategic alliance will allow more travel managers to become acquainted with Trip Manager, said Vela McClam-Mitchell, Worldspan's director of global corporate and consumer sales and marketing. By combining their products, the partners can deliver a higher level of productivity, unprecedented flexibility and convenience.
Formed just last year through the renaming of Brock International and the acquisition of Netgain, Firstwave reported 1998 revenues of $14.5 million, with a year-end loss of more than $1 million. The company last year invested more than $4 million in the creation and launch of Netgain Sales.
Company executives expect the investments to pay off, pointing to research conducted by AMR Research and the Boston-based Aberdeen Group, which forecast an almost six-fold growth in customer relationship management software over the next few years. The Aberdeen Group said midsize implementations are the fastest growing segment of the market, with growth expected to exceed 60 percent per year, to more than $2 billion in 2001.
The software will be available on a per-seat basis in a hosted environment for a monthly fee of $3,000, or it can be purchased outright for $42,900.