A ban by some companies on traveling with laptops because of data security concerns is creating more demand for travel booking and expense reporting applications on BlackBerry and other mobile devices, according to suppliers.
Travel suppliers providing services on mobile platforms include such online booking suppliers as TRX and GetThere and such expense reporting suppliers as CyberShift's Necho, which last year partnered with Boston-based Vaultus Mobile Technologies to offer an edition of its expense tool that allowed clients to create and manage expense reports through their BlackBerry devices
(BTNonline, Sept. 10, 2007).CyberShift recently published a white paper citing data from the Privacy Rights Clearing House indicating that about one-third of data breach events stem from a laptop theft. In addition, an April 21 federal appeals court decision gave customs officials at U.S. border crossings authority to examine, copy and seize travelers' laptops even without reasonable suspicions, according to the Association of Corporate Travel Executives. "This decision will have significant impact on business travelers who have no idea their data is subject to search and seizure," ACTE global executive director Susan Gurley said.
CyberShift senior product director Craig Fearon sees the mandate to stop travelers from carrying laptops coming most frequently from financial services organizations. "They've had a number of incidents of financial advisors traveling with laptops that disappeared during screening at the airport or were stolen out of rental cars," he said.
Fearon said questions regarding mobile capabilities have begun appearing more frequently on incoming requests for proposals. "We have clients that are looking for that specifically," he said.
Early adopters of Necho's tool—an application specifically for the BlackBerry, not a scaled-down Web version that Fearon said would be less secure—generally have trended toward the financial and other high-security sectors. He said it's following a similar pattern as receipt imaging, which has become more prevalent as technology matures.
"It's been slow to build in terms of the interest of the number of clients we had," Fearon said. "It's nowhere close to adoption rates for imaging, but it's definitely the wave in which we believe expense reporting is going."
Necho's next step, possibly by the end of May, is to begin piloting a version of the BlackBerry tool that lets managers review and approve submitted expense reports on their devices, Fearon said, noting the demand for the application comes directly from corporate clients, for such devices often are in the hands of senior managers.
"This is the next round of development," Fearon said. "It's that goal of providing that level of convenience and increasing the turnaround time for approval."