Matchmaker for meetings

Say your Philadelphia company needs to find a place in Phoenix to pitch its latest widget to 50 potential customers. But you have no idea which Phoenix site would provide the right ambiance at a fair price.

The solution to the problem is likely to be StarCite Inc., an eight-year-old Philadelphia company that operates what's widely considered the world's leading online meetings marketplace, linking hundreds of corporate meeting planners with thousands of venues such as hotels, restaurants, and convention and conference centers.

"We're like match.com or eharmony.com for meeting planners," said Michael Boult, StarCite's president and chief executive officer.

For the Philadelphia widget-maker, that could mean using StarCite to shop among dozens of hotels around Phoenix, looking at costs and the type of meeting space and other amenities available. Once a site is selected, the planner can use the Web site to book the space, track spending for the meeting, register those planning to attend, and later compare the actual costs to what was budgeted.

StarCite's software serves an industry that is far larger and more diffuse than many people realize.

Beyond the handful of large groups that fit only into a site like the Convention Center, companies and associations worldwide spend an estimated $300 billion a year on millions of meetings, the majority of them attended by fewer than 50 people, Boult said.

In this country alone, industry experts estimate that 800 million people a year attend business meetings of 10 or more, evidence that people still need face-to-face contact in the digital age, he said.

"It's a massive industry," Boult said. "Our goal is to digitize that spending, but not lose sight of the reason people meet. Companies want to save money, but create excitement around those meetings."

Privately held StarCite started in 1999 as an offshoot of McGettigan Partners, one of the region's oldest travel agencies and a specialist in planning meetings and other events.

But founder John F. Pino, who's now president of StarCite's international division, said it ran into serious headwinds a year later when the dot-com bust led to sharp cutbacks in spending on new technology and travel. The number of employees at its offices at 1650 Arch St. in Center City plummeted from 180 to 20.

StarCite hung on, slowly building back its business as more big companies, recovering after 9/11, looked for ways to cut down on travel costs, one of their largest controllable expense categories. Many companies already were actively managing air travel and hotel costs by centralizing and automating employee booking and expense-reporting processes.

But they weren't doing the same for meetings, giving StarCite a huge opportunity, Boult said.

StarCite's business grew slowly from 2002 until August 2006, when it merged with its largest rival, OnVantage Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif. The transaction was described at the time in the meetings-industry trade press as the equivalent of Microsoft Corp. buying Apple Inc. The combination, operating under the name StarCite, is ahead of anyone else in the field, and will more than double StarCite's revenue this year, Boult said.

StarCite doesn't disclose exact sales and net income, but Inc. magazine estimated its 2006 revenue at $24.2 million in its annual ranking of the 5,000 fastest-growing privately held companies. It now has about 400 employees.

The enlarged StarCite says more than 400 companies worldwide, most of them large, now pay it to shop for meeting space and to manage all the details and costs. The client list includes four of the world's five largest pharmaceutical companies and banks, and three of the top five manufacturing and software companies. StarCite estimates that its corporate customers will use the software to spend about $2.7 billion on planning and staging meetings this year.

Corporate purchasing managers in particular like StarCite, Boult said, because "their job is one thing: Buy things for less."

StarCite also gets revenue from some of the 93,000 hotels, restaurants and conference and convention centers that it lists as meeting suppliers. Like Yellow Pages listings, a basic entry on the Web site is free, but a supplier can pay for a larger and more prominent display.

Big convention bureaus, like the Philadelphia Convention and Visitors Bureau, are not StarCite's main customers and tend to employ their own sales forces aimed at associations and trade shows.

StarCite's corporate customers say they like the way the software has given them better information about the number of meetings each division of their companies is running and how much is being spent.

Gina Armendaritz, the travel and meetings manager for Allergan Inc., an Irvine, Calif., pharmaceutical- and medical-device-maker, said that, when she came to the company 21/2 years ago, senior executives knew that perhaps 100 larger meetings a year were taking place. But a decentralized management structure meant that they didn't know what was being spent on hundreds of other meetings staged by various divisions - a problem that centralizing data using StarCite has helped solve, she said.

"We needed data reporting about all the meetings," Armendaritz said. "We wanted full visibility to what our company was doing as a whole. Our spending was being reported in different ways by different divisions."

Now, each time a division wants to hold a meeting, it submits a request to Armendaritz's department first. One of her staff takes over, she said, using StarCite to find the best location that meets the budget and then to manage every detail of signing up participants and tracking its costs.

Hotels use StarCite to post details of their meeting space and when it's available. Some are enthusiastic fans.

"StarCite is a phenomenal tool for us," said Frank Ashmore, general manager of the Carefree Resort in Carefree, Ariz., which uses the software to help fill its 465 hotel rooms and 60,000 square feet of meeting space. "It streamlines the process for any company looking for meeting space. . . . If a company I'm working with doesn't use StarCite, I send them to StarCite. It's very user-friendly."

Another hotel executive, Bonnie Weiss, director of pharmaceutical-industry sales for Hyatt, said one of StarCite's greatest advantages besides its ease of use is that it allows meeting planners and suppliers like her to exchange information day or night.

"This is just the wave of the future," Weiss said. "We're a 24-hour society now. That's what StarCite has done for the industry. . . . There's nothing else like it that I'm aware of."

Location: Philadelphia.

Ownership: Private.

Employees: 400, up from 20 in 2000 due to merger and growth.

Revenue: $24.2 million last year (estimate by Inc. magazine).

Customers: Roughly 400 corporations looking for veunes for their meetings, and about 93,000 venues (hotels, restaurants and conference centers) looking for meetings.

Impact: StarCite estimates that corporate customers using its software will spend about $2.7 billion on planning and staging meetings this year.EndText