Harman International Signs with GetThere for Sabre Virtual Meetings

Integration of Travel and Video Conferencing Helps Manage Travel Expenses and Increase ROI on Technology Investment SOUTHLAKE, Texas – Feb. 28, 2013 – Harman International and GetThere, the world’s leading travel and collaboration management solution, have signed an agreement to make Sabre Virtual Meetings technology available to Harman employees worldwide. Using Sabre Virtual Meetings, Harman employees around the globe can reserve virtual meeting rooms as easily as they book flights, hotels and cars in GetThere. Harman, a Sabre customer since 2000, expects Sabre Virtual Meetings to help them manage travel demand and increase use of the company’s existing investment in high-definition video conferencing assets. “Virtual Meetings is a powerful new travel management mechanism,” said Sally Abella, director of Global Corporate Travel for Harman International.  “Like most companies, we want to control our travel spend, yet we all know that travel is crucial to growing the business. By using video conferencing for more internal meetings, we can strategically redirect travel spend to trips that are customer-facing and sales focused.” Harman and GetThere are partnering to monitor and track Harman’s goals to redirect internal travel spend and increase room utilization. “Demand for video conferencing is increasing exponentially and more and more IT departments are called upon to support this demand,” said Thomas Blanchet, director of IT Infrastructure Architecture at Harman International. “Sabre Virtual Meetings gives our employees a way to easily reserve and connect video conferencing rooms in a secure and reliable enterprise-wide environment.” Until now, scheduling video conference systems has been a challenging task with limited visibility into room availability, time zone challenges, and system compatibility issues. The result has been an over-dependence on IT support and limited employee adoption which means expensive video conferencing investments sit unused. “Sabre Virtual Meetings solves these challenges with an easy-to-use, global scheduling system. Room availability, compatibility, and connectivity are all seamlessly verified, so employees know where to book, what’s available and what to do when they show up to a meeting,” said Suzanne Neufang, president of GetThere and Sabre Virtual Meetings. “Our Virtual Meetings solution also enables public room and partner room access for those companies looking to maximize visual collaboration.” Sabre Virtual Meetings is the only solution providing enterprise-wide, secure access to private and partner video conferencing rooms as well as a global network of over 4,000 public rooms. Similar to online travel reservations, all options for a given city pair search are provided in a single, secure booking path. Filtered by company policy and room availability that the corporation explicitly authorizes, employees can choose the room options that best meet their business needs.