GetThere announced its new Collaboration Suite - a patent-pending collection of solutions enabling corporations and the travel agencies that serve them to maximise their Return on Investment (ROI) on travel and virtual meeting services.
GetThere unveiled its Collaboration Suite to customers at the European Customer Summit in London, where more than 100 corporate travel managers, procurement professionals and travel management company officials gathered to learn more about GetThere's strategy, product vision, upcoming enhancements and best practices.
GetThere is driving development of the Collaboration Suite in tandem with new algorithmic technology from Sabre Research, the same group that played a significant role in the invention of yield management for airlines in the past.
The Collaboration Suite represents the first set of solutions designed to help corporations manage both business travel and other types of collaboration such as web, audio and video conferencing, as well as business-oriented social media.
A Sabre Travel Network business, industry-leading GetThere has self-booking deployments in 76 countries.
More than $9 billion in business travel bookings are made annually via GetThere, with the majority of America's 100 largest corporate travel programs using the solution.
Sabre Research, part of Sabre's CIO organisation, assists Sabre business units by performing business intelligence analysis on large data sets, building predictive statistical models and verifying replicable methods.
Why Collaboration, Why Now
Oxford Economics released statistics earlier this month, revealing that $12.50 in revenue and $3.80 in new profit are generated with each dollar spent on business travel (read more).
While those figures may prove to be stimulative for business travel as the recession ends, GetThere's customer needs are evolving from travel management to collaboration management - a trend recently highlighted in a poll of U.K corporate travel managers who said emerging collaboration tools could reduce travel by up to 18 percent over the next decade.
"This shift is the driving force behind our own evolution from travel procurement provider to a leader in best-in-class collaboration management tools," said Chris Kroeger, president of GetThere.
"The Collaboration Suite reinforces our ability to respond swiftly to market needs, lays the foundation for our portfolio moving forward, and enables customers to effectively maximise investment in employee-collaboration options and company collaboration assets."
Components That Help Corporations Collaborate
GetThere's new Collaboration Suite will be the first solution that enables both corporations and agencies to shop and book preferred collaboration assets within the GetThere workflow.
It is intended to be a CIO's logical choice for making sense of the various desktop, telecommunications, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-based employee workflow options.
The Suite includes the following features, aimed at giving companies the ability to easily define the ROI of a potential trip, and validate investment and expenditure in new collaboration tools:
- Return on Invested Collaboration (ROIC) Calculator - Based on a combination of trip "value" inputs by employees, policy "controls" configured by corporations, and back-end calculation models developed by Sabre Research, the industry-first calculator provides fiscally-responsible options for successful collaboration.
- Social Networking Community - Sabre's enterprise community platform - cubeless (R) - enables companies to tap into the collective intelligence of its workforce to facilitate knowledge sharing, networking via questions, answers and exploration tags, and destination advice. It also offers opt-in GetThere itinerary sharing for optimal travel choices, such as ride-sharing and itinerary matching, across a broad employee base.
- GetThere Meetings - GetThere Meetings provides planners and attendees with a seamless option to book and manage meetings, while also delivering significant savings. The meetings component enables companies to track and control meeting and associated travel costs, while driving compliance with policies and contract commitments.
- Collaboration Inventory Management - Featuring content from both travel-related and non travel-related sources, the Collaboration Inventory component enables corporations to automate the shopping and booking of all types of collaboration content from air travel to video conferencing services.
The first phase of GetThere's new Collaboration Suite will be available by the end of 2009.
For more information, visit GetThere
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