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Tech is a chief challenge amid agency consolidation.

Article Excerpt
Among the greatest challenges corporate travel management firms face as they consolidate is determining what to do about disparate technologies. The principals in the most recent moves--Amex-Rosenbluth, Carlson-Maritz and TQ3-Navigant--and other sources agreed that client data reporting is tops among several technology integration priorities that also include back-office accounting, quality control, profile management and agent desktops.

"For an acquisition to make sense, you have to get to some common platforms because it gets expensive to be supporting two or three and not achieving the scale and cost benefits," said TRX Inc. executive vice president of sales and client services Steve Reynolds. Corner-stone Information Systems president Mat Orrego agreed that "in general, the operations and IT side of it is really where the return on investment will come."

"The big customer concern when two corporate agencies merge is that you don't want an interruption of the data," said Hi-Mark Software president Kevin Austin. While Austin said that does not necessarily require merging the transactions from one back-office system into another, the industry's two mega acquisitions do appear to be heading to the same products, respectively. However, Austin and Reynolds noted, being on the same system does not necessarily solve every issue, since there are unique codes to identify clients that can overlap. The back office "is the real hard one," Reynolds said.

Maritz already had been seeking a...

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