The Road Warrior As Travel Agent
Business travel, already a $153 billion industry as of 2003 (the last full year for which data is available) continues to rise, and as it does, companies are increasingly looking to technology to help pare costs. In a survey of more than 550 business travelers, Accenture found that nearly three-quarters of them regularly book on-line. Only 22 percent prefer to deal with a travel agent, a notable decline from the 36 percent who indicated that as their preferred method a year earlier. Online booking can put plenty of information at an employee's fingertips, but it's not a panacea: some sites do not display all available airfares, and a number of hotel chains have decided that in order to drive visitors to their corporate booking sites they won't offer any discounts through third-party sites. "Travel is an area that has always been ripe for savings," says Lane Dubin, vice president of business development, North America, for American Express Travel Services, "but it's only now getting real attention from companies." That attention takes many forms, from automated T&E systems (see "Putting More 'E' in T&E") to consulting services that can help companies navigate this complex terrain. Dubin says companies are currently changing their focus, from reducing transaction costs to cutting overall travel expenditures. Last month Travelocity announced a new service that helps companies manage and reissue unused airline tickets — an expense that can sometimes amount to 5 to 7 percent of a company's travel budget, according to Travelocity. The service relies on new technological capabilities and industry expertise, a combination that many online travel-services companies will be highlighting as they continue to woo corporate clients.
When Taxes Aren't, In Fact, Certain
According to a new study, for all the numbers that companies crunch when deciding when and whether to purchase new technology, there is one area that goes conspicuously unexamined: taxes. More than 70 percent of companies ignore tax considerations when evaluating IT acquisitions, say Deloitte Consulting and IDC Research. These companies miss out on potential savings, while also increasing the risk that they will underpay taxes and face penalties. Sales tax overpayment (stemming from misclassified purchases or turning nontaxable deliveries into taxable events), inadequately documenting R&D tax credits, and disregarding state and local tax grants for expenses such as training staff in new technologies are but a few ways that tax issues can affect the total cost of ownership. Part of the problem is that many companies assume that the legal or procurement department looks at tax implications when, in fact, they may not. About a quarter of the survey respondents said they didn't think tax matters would have a material impact on buying decisions, but Deloitte maintains that tax ignorance results in millions of dollars of unrealized savings.
No Room at the Internet
You might think that 4 billion of anything is plenty, but you'd be wrong. So say proponents of Internet Version 6, also known as IPv6, the next-generation foundational technology for the Internet, which so far has met with a collective yawn on the part of the technology companies that will ultimately deploy it. A recent survey by Juniper Networks of nearly 350 federal and corporate IT executives found that while 80 percent of them want better security, network management, and quality of service, only 7 percent regard IPv6 as important to meeting those goals. But IPv6 advocates say that this next-generation Internet Protocol technology will tackle those concerns and more. "The current version, IPv4, dates from the 1970s and 1980s, and only accommodates about 4 billion IP addresses, which is proving to be too few," says Ben Schultz, managing engineer at the University of New Hampshire's InterOperability Lab and director of Moon v6, a public-private collaboration. There are short-term work-arounds, but eventually, without new technology, the system will essentially reach capacity. Last month, in an effort to demonstrate that IPv6 is ready for prime time, a consortium that included MCI, France Telecom, Lucent, and UNH demonstrated how the system can be used to provide a global multimedia service, such as a corporate distance-learning program. But the ISPs and other companies that must ultimately swap out old gear for new and train their staffs in the new protocol have shown little inclination to move.
Reader Comments» Post a comment