Shop Talk: StarCite’s web-based event planning software is all about SaaS

The Chief Financial Officer of purchasing at any large company can easily pull up a budget and see how much money is being spent on telephones, computers and office furniture.
But meetings and conferences are a hidden expense category: their budgets are often hidden away within departments and divisions with no way to see spending at an executive level.
That’s foolish. At least, it seems so after a chat with Center City-based StarCite Inc. Vice President Kevin Young.
“Instead of spending $10 million at different hotels, corporate event planners could go to Marriot directly and say ‘Let’s talk about better rates. What can you do for us?,'” he says.
If planners had a way to see spending, that is.

Enter StarCite, a provider of web-based solutions that automates corporate meeting and event planning and provides much needed spending visibility.
Just across the street from City Hall on Arch Street, StarCite has become a “dominant player” in the meeting planning technology field.
“We are a Philly company that originated here, was funded and backed by venture capital in Philadelphia, and I hope that we become one of the success stories,” he says.
Hope? It might have already.
Of the company’s 400 corporate clients, close to half are Fortune 500 or Global 1000 clients. It markets 93,000 hotel and meeting properties. And it boasts 3 million attendee transactions each year.
StarCite evolved from a technology developed to ease the digital refuse of event planning by McGettin Partners, a travel, meeting and planning company that managed large corporate events. The technology provided a seamless, automated system for corporate meeting and event planning.
Then StarCite founder John Pino realized that the technology was valuable outside of the company by itself. He spun it off and created the independent company in 1999.
Before tech companies like StarCite provided such services, planning companies developed their own software to manage the process. That got old quick.
“I think it’s because they are not technology companies. It’s too difficult to manage it, maintain it and own it. It’s much easier to go to a company like us, where it’s all we do,” Young said.
Even high-tech companies like Oracle and IBM, which are StarCite clients, gravitate toward third-party management systems.
“They have tremendous software capabilities, but its not their core competency, so it becomes a distraction to the core mission,” he said.
StarCite has offered itself as Software as a Service (SaaS) since it launched in 1999, enabling businesses to forego costly in-house software setups for web access to the platform.
It’s a model that Young thinks businesses are coming around on.
“Not too long ago, corporations weren’t ready for SaaS. They saw it as risky, data might not be secure, and they wanted total control,” he says.
“Now, more and more companies have gotten comfortable with the idea. The savings are huge in terms of the cost and effort to make the service usable.”
It’s also a solution that continues to be innovated.
As booking of meetings becomes more and more automated, StarCite is working on technologies that link to hotel back-end systems without manual intervention. Typically, meetings requiring more than nine rooms necessitate a hotel clerk for verification. Young says that the company hopes to expand that to 25 or 30 rooms with its system.
Corporations have been cutting back on meeting expenses during the economic slow down and StarCite hasn’t been immune.
Earlier this month, the company began offering its software free to new customers until June, with hopes of getting them hooked to the potential for savings.
Still, the company is fortunate to rely on two revenue models, Young says, that make up its service base.
There’s the buy-side, that is, every entity that creates meetings, whether it’s corporate clients or third-party corporate planners. They use the service to manage their meeting budget, with visibility and control over how money is spent. They’re charged subscription fees to access the online web platform.
Then, there’s the supply-side: hotels, venues and anywhere that can pack people in. They’re charged marketing dollars. “We give them opportunities to merchandise themselves,” Young says.
He says that diversifying revenue has really helped the business model.
“We’re selling to audiences that have very different business cycles. It helps when things are good and when things are tough, as they are today,” he said.
Image courtesy of NASA.