As we finished 2016, we took time to look across our solutions and take stock of where we stood. Our goal is to make strong investments in our core platforms, adding new capabilities to enable you to make better business decisions, and listening to feedback from you, our customers and our partners.
2016: A Year Of Change
Last year was a year of swapping out and upgrading the old with the new at Cornerstone. We focused on making architectural changes to our iBank® software platform – changing the entire report production and distribution code base. These efforts will allow you to create the reports and analyses that you need faster and with more flexibility. Requests that used to require engineering development can now be managed through configuration.
We also ensured our existing redundant and robust systems are ready for future growth. We increased the capacity of our server cluster and moved to all-flash memory solution. Our investment into the all-flash memory technology provides the foundation for next-generation business applications as well as bolstering support of real-time analytics. This new structure gives us eight times the input/output per second that we had previously as well as sub-millisecond latency.
We also released our TravelOptix™ software platform in 2016, as well as our new AutoPay™ product. TravelOptix provides you the flexibility to load data from virtually any data source, including spreadsheets, databases, operational systems, ERP, and web sources. Additionally, TravelOptix gives you the control to cleanse, transform, and unify multiple disparate data sources without requiring external tools. TravelOptix allows you to tell your own story on a responsive platform. The self-service data visualization enables you to answer your own questions on the fly, from any device, with data governance for your back office and reservation data built in.
AutoPay enables you to request virtual cards from within your desktop workflow, automates the generation of the virtual card numbers with the financial institution, provides that information back into the booking and passes enriched data to your back-office systems for 100% reconciliation. We partnered with two leading payment aggregators this year – eNett and Conferma. This ensures we can provide you full range of capabilities and options that best fit your individual needs.
2017: Where We Are Going
We remain committed to our mission in 2017. This year we plan to enhance our unique domain knowledge around travel data – from how travel is operationalized to how information is managed.
We remain committed to helping our customers manage their process and information, to drive better decision making. Our focus continues to be on travel data, from the management of the reservation to the creation and presentation of information.
As we enter 2017, we want to build on the progress we made in 2016 with three main areas of investment.
1) Investing in system infrastructure
We will focus on enhancing and upgrading our access to our partners, especially our GDS partners. This includes updating some of our APIs and web service calls, as well as capturing reservation data in new ways. Much of this work happens in the background – you will see the benefits in faster access to data, quicker processing times, and greater continuity of data.
We know that process times and system reliability are critically important for your business. We maintained our 99.99% uptime in 2016, and our goal is to continue provide that exceptional level of performance.
2) Expanding data capture capabilities
One of the most valuable capabilities of our TravelOptix platform is its ability to load and analyze data from any source. A critical area of focus for us in 2017 is to expand the data connections we have.
This includes building new partnerships to add data sources, and building custom links for our customers. We are evaluating the best methods of bringing data into our unified environment, so that you can view everything from reservation data to expense and human resources data in one place. This also benefits our Policy Compliance Manager™ product as well as AutoPay.
Expanding our data capture capabilities ensures that we can continue to uncover insights for your business, helping you make data-driven decisions.
3) Launching 4site™ platform
One of the areas we are most excited about is the market release of 4site. You may have seen glimpses of this Innovation Team project over the last year and a half. We have iterated our 4site platform a few times and the result is a data-driven platform designed to manage travelers before and during travel, anticipating disruptions before they happen.
We are developing 4site to use predictive intelligence to calculate the most likely scenario at any given moment, allowing the traveler, corporate travel manager, and travel management company to respond in real time.
We think that 4site will be one of the most exciting set of capabilities we bring to market in 2017.
Questions? Feel free to contact your Cornerstone account manager or email ask@ciswired.com.