Starcite is profitable 17-Apr-09 04:02 pm Friday, April 10, 2009, 10:17am EDT | Modified: Friday, April 10, 2009, 10:38am
StarCite offers free servicePhiladelphia Business Journal
CommentsStarCite Inc. has launched its own stimulus plan.
The Center City Philadelphia-based company is offering its Web-based meeting-management software free to new customers through June 30.
StarCite’s motives aren’t entirely altruistic.
Greg Dukat, the company’s CEO, said the economic downturn has led to an uptick in potential customers among corporations looking for ways to control the costs of the meetings.
The hope is that, by allowing them to try its products and services for a few months, StarCite can convert them from potential customers to actual ones.
“We thought that once they began to use our platform, began to use the technology, they would really fall in love with it, which has historically been the case,” Dukat said.
StarCite enables businesses to control their meeting costs by giving them one place to choose from a wide variety of hotels for their meetings. Its software also sets out to allow them to better manage all aspects of planning and holding meetings.
Dukat said the company’s potential customers include large corporations that, in addition to wanting to control how much they spend on meetings, must make sure the way they hold their meetings is in line with their industry’s rules and regulations.
“We felt like providing this platform would help them control issues around compliance,” he said.
Although he wouldn’t reveal StarCite’s revenue or income, Dukat said the company has been growing at more than 25 percent a year since it merged with OnVantage Inc. at the end of 2006 and has been profitable in the last couple of quarters.
The recession has slowed the company’s growth, but not stopped it, he said.
“We aren’t growing as fast as we were in the past, but we are growing,” he said.
Dukat said some of that growth is coming from existing customers that hadn’t used StarCite throughout their entire organization but now want to because they think it will enable them to reduce the amount they spend on meetings.
They’re saying “if there’s a way to save $1 of expense and this platform’s the way, we want every meeting to run through this platform,” he said.
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Re: Starcite is profitable 17-Apr-09 04:04 pm Most important sentence of the last posting
"Dukat said the company has been growing at more than 25 percent a year since it merged with OnVantage Inc. at the end of 2006 and has been profitable in the last couple of quarters." Rating :
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Re: Starcite is profitable 3 second(s) ago Internet Capital owns 34% of Starcite.