Yves Weisselberger
After offering expense management services in Europe for about two years, KDS next month will produce a global version of its KDS Corporate tool that includes integrated expense and travel management. The company claimed it would lead the industry in booking and expense integration, and said new features including sophisticated VAT management and level-three data were driven by Sarbanes-Oxley requirements. The Transnationaltoday spoke with KDS co-founder and CEO Yves Weisselberger. An excerpt of the discussion follows.
KDS is saying that this integration is seamless in a way that other companies have not accomplished. What is this new product offering that others are missing?
There are two big dimensions. The first one is to have a single unique software, which means you don't create interfaces between two different modules. The most famous company you're thinking about may be Concur, for example. The marketing of Concur is that they have travel and expense, but the actual situation is they have two products, one for travel and one for expense. In KDS, we have one product for both--one database, one user interface and one workflow. This is not at all the case with the competitors you may be thinking of. Being designed this way, you have some functions that you cannot imagine when you interface two pieces of software. For example, when a booking is made in KDS, all the information regarding the trip immediately pre-populates the expense report for the traveler. The second dimension is that when we say "full travel and expense," we mean even more than travel booking and expense management. For example, in this version we have introduced travel agency invoicing management, which is included neither in online booking software like GetThere nor in [existing] expense management software. They don't manage invoices, so when you are creating an expense report, there are some missing pieces. We have also decided that our role is to manage the whole set of expenses, even the offline trips. And to manage offline trips, we get back the passenger name record from the travel agency.
Will existing clients pay more for the new version, and what is your implementation plan?
If a customer is already using travel and expense, there are no additional costs. If they are using travel and they continue with the same scope, there are no additional costs. They have additional costs if they now are using travel and want to use travel and expense. Tomorrow is the official commercial launch of version six, and the availability in production is more precisely for 16 November. Customers will all be upgraded. It can take time. We want to oblige everyone, and from 17 November it will probably take a number of months, to mid-2007 or maybe later, for everyone to be on the new version. This migration will not require any work from the customers. Our process that takes care of that. The migration will be transparent.
According to your announcement, the system also "offers all the required travel modules including air, train, hotel and car rental reservations on one platform." How was that different in the previous version?
There is a brand new user interface with, for example, a matrix and a filter--the up to date UI that you see on sites like Kayak or Orbitz. There is a new UI for air, and the same principle [applies] for hotel, car and train. For all these travel services, you have the capability to filter and sort the results based on various criteria and to refine the search, as well as the matrix.
KDS also said it has "a large number of new direct Web links." Can you give some examples, and are these links to the vendors' internal reservations systems or their Web sites?
We have, for example, Virgin Blue, Aer Lingus, Hapag-Lloyd, Flybe ... we have about 20 new links in the new version out of about 50 overall. We also have links to hotel systems, Avis, Hertz, Europcar--and in all these cases, they are direct links to their own reservation systems. With Virgin Blue, it is a direct link. For a certain number, such as low-cost carriers including Ryanair, easyJet and Germanwings, we have and continue to develop our Web engine, so we have a large number that we access through the Web link.
With direct links, the concept in some cases is that connecting this way is less expensive than using a global distribution system. Do you have a different pricing structure for direct links, and do the clients share in the savings?
KDS has no different pricing structure, but what will happen in some cases is that the companies are in a position to negotiate with, say, Avis, so that maybe if you don't go through the GDS, they will give you a reduced price because they don't incur the GDS fee. Also, in some cases, the direct link has richer capabilities than what you get through the GDS. KDS is not looking to work more than necessary and we are not looking for direct links. But we are willing to have them, because sometimes this information is not in the GDS. If the information is in the GDS, why would we bother? So it's really very pragmatic.