It has not even been one month since Amlink Technologies merged into Certain Software, but it already feels we have been together for along time - there are so many similarities in management vision and philosophy. During the first week of April, the executive team from Amlink met with the senior management team from Certain to create the foundation for the executive leadership team for the merged Certain.  Trevor Gardiner, the CEO from Amlink is taking on a leadership role with the new Certain as COO and will continue to lead the events™ product team.  One clear directive for the merger, as stated by Jim Pappas, Certain’s CEO is that the merged company acts as one global organization, with two great product lines and two great product teams, events™ and Certain Registration™.  That clearly came out after our first week together.
 
The Executive Merger Transition Committee (EMTC) will oversee the nuts and bolts of the merger.  Led by Dr. Rick Borry with Trevor Gardiner, Ken Voss, EVP of sales and marketing and Chris Buckley the team will oversee the strategy for organizational infrastructure and product strategy.  Amlink brings deep functionality with events™, including membership management and continuing education (CE) and is ready to release a new version of events™ in May.  Certain Registration™ will also release a new version in May which includes session level waitlist, barcode on confirmations and will be debuting on-demand training modules.  So there is a lot of exciting and ongoing developments along both product lines.  As we move forward, we will look at how we bring the best of both product lines to our customers.  But for now, it means two great solutions for meeting and events professionals with additional functionality, more choices for deployment and pricing options.

We are all excited about the opportunity to grow with the industry, to be the global provider of technology for the meetings and events industry.  With 5 offices around the world, and with a new Sydney office scheduled to open in May, we now have over 150 employees and process over 6 million registrations in 2008.  All to better serve our customers with the best service and support in the industry.  It has been a whirlwind, and will continue to be very exciting times for the New Certain. As always, we will still keep our focus on our first priority….our customers. 

As the old phrase says, "knowing is half the battle." In the whirlwind life of professional conference planners, this saying couldn't be more true. With site visits to make, vendor contracts to negotiate, and confused registrants calling every two minutes, getting an overview of the meetings season and of the money that's being spent may sometimes feel like an unattainable goal.

Certain Registration helps event planners get control of the big picture by offering information about key meeting factors, and by allowing for strong Consolidation reporting across all events done that year (or multi-year). We offer:

1. A unified and easily navigable Events List that lets you see which events just finished, which are upcoming, where they are occurring, and how many people have registered so far for each.

2. Custom Event data fields to track extra details about each event that you may need, whether it's a departmental code, a travel partner, or the on-site manager's name and phone number.

3. Consolidation reporting that helps you see activity across multiple events at once. How many events did you do by location? How many registrants went to multiple events? What was your average attendance this year vs. last year?

4. Event budgets with General Ledger codes specific to your accounting practices. We let you build your own General Ledger matrix for spend categories and codes, or you can use ours. Then track your projected and actual spend for each meeting, and report on the numbers across events using Consolidation reporting.

In subsequent releases, we will introduce new functionality to help you get even more control. We'll let you track meeting requests and approvals, use an automatic budget estimator to easily build better budget estimates, and assign meeting planner staff to events, all within one set of tools.

Stay tuned to our Certain blog for updates on the latest in our Meetings Management product suite.

Tip #1 - As an event planner or meeting planner you know the importance of a well organized event. Using that same strategic way of thinking, when you build an event in Certain's event registration software, will help you save time and money. A great way to create an event plan is to ask your Implementation Manager or Sales Representative for an SOW or Statement of Work document. This document outlines the major areas of Certain Registration and will assist you in gathering all the information you need to begin building your event the right way from the start. Whether you're building your own special event or working with one of our Implementation Managers to create a multi city trade show, a little planning saves more than a little time. And as we all know, time = money!