With corporate customers, Yapta loads its software into travel department booking systems. It doesn't charge for the service but takes a cut of the savings, usually about 35%, Mr. Filsinger said. With consumers, use of the tracking tool is free. Companies, like consumers, can set a threshold on minimum savings before an alert is sent, to take into account change fees and other expenses. The company recently launched a similar system to check for falling hotel room prices, but so far that's offered only to corporate travel departments and not consumers.
The bigger the fare, the bigger the potential savings, so travel managers say they have seen their most eye-popping results on international business-class tickets.
One Friday, Al Mazzola, director of travel services at Sykes Enterprises Inc., a Florida technology-consulting company, booked a $19,000 business-class ticket from Tampa to Shanghai and back, only to see it fall to $7,000 over the weekend. With the Yapta alert, the company grabbed the new price. "I was stunned. I've never seen savings like that,'' Mr. Mazzola said
“Systems of Advantage” at OOW
In contrast to Larry Ellison’s keynote last night which focused on systems of record and systems of engagement that Oracle is delivering in the cloud, Mark Hurd this morning had 8 CIOs representing some of the most complex enterprises in the world. They represent over 1.2 million employees and annual revenues of nearly $ 340 billion.
The contrast was striking – these CIOs are focused more on the term we coined ‘systems of advantage” in The Digital Enterprise. They have plenty of IT architects, they build plenty of custom systems, they are pushing the envelope on a wide range of supply chain, product, customer facing, globalization areas
Tim Theriault of Walgreens, whose mobile apps I have written about before, discussed their complex supply chain which provisions lobsters to stores in the Northeast and Elvis pictures in Vegas. He discussed home health care Walgreens sees an opportunity in since 2/3 of the US is within 3 miles of a store. He later told me they are using a “light” electronic patients record system from Greenway.
Jamie Miller of GE talked about the Industrial Internet (see here) . She talked about simplification efforts – core processes at scale with cloud like models, and innovation at the edge.
Filippo Passerini of P&G talked about global supply chain issues to keep shelves stocked to not disappoint 4 billion consumers that use its products. He described social listening as they do several product launches year, and the significant data visualization technologies they have deployed.
Yael Cosset of dunnhumby, which describes itself as a “customer science” company, talked about the Big Data of “consumer digital breadcrumbs” and the personalization and consumer engagement opportunities. He also talked about the future of “quantified self” data that wearable technologies are generating and opportunities for healthcare and CPG companies.
Albert Hitchcock of Pearson talked about the challenges in the educational publishing industry, talked about homogenization of customer data.
Stephen Little of Xerox talked about a transition from a manufacturing to a services business (they acquired ACS a few years ago and even the copier business is more about services). In a later breakout he described trends in vertical BPO (“smart city’ work and healthcare particularly healthy) and the far more competitive ITO market.
Rob Carter of Fedex talked about the large number of infrastructure, platform and business services they leverage. He has long been a “rock star” CIO and the SOA effort at such a large company is one of the most complex they have invested in
Kimberly S. Stevenson of Intel talked about IT productivity they have invested in – virtualization etc and now they are focused on business productivity as they move into wearables, mobile devices and other formats as the PC market has matured.
The session could easily have gone another couple of hours. As an example, once a year, GE does a full day update on the Industrial Internet and they break it out by impact on major verticals like Aviation, Healthcare, Oil & Gas, Power & Water and Transportation.
My favorite session at OOW!
September 29, 2014 in Industry Commentary | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)