SiteMinder Limited (ASX:SDR) is best known as the world’s leading open hotel commerce platform, ranked among technology pioneers for opening up every hotel’s access to online commerce. On top of being a publicly-traded vertical SaaS platform servicing 33,000+ hotels in 150 countries globally, it’s a true innovator and industry leader. From its roots in Australia, today SiteMinder has offices in Bangkok, Berlin, Dallas, Galway, London and Manila, and in a regular year it generates more than 100 million reservations worth over $35 billion in revenue for hotels. I had the fortune of investing in SiteMinder in 2013 and served at various times as board director, lead director, and non-executive chairman.
SiteMinder exhibits many of the strategies that the VSKP advocates for. They integrated and surrounded a control point, extended their product towards consumers, and went from a single application to multi-product to being a platform. For their consumer extension, they ended up repurposing existing infrastructure to open new channels of demand—allowing a hotel to tap into customer segments that wouldn’t have been easily available to them without SiteMinder.
Sankar Narayan, CEO and MD, and Dai Williams, Chief Growth Officer, brought their extensive work experience to this new company and have turned it into a global brand. Their success was hard earned, and strategically achieved. I’m really excited that they agreed to chat with me and discuss their extension into consumer demand.
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