In 1998, Meetings Plus, a 12-year-old conference-planning firm in the San Francisco Bay area, figured they had to be as Web-savvy as their high-tech clients in Silicon Valley. So, they started offering online conference registrations on what had been an underused company Web site.

Little did they know this decision would transform the way they did business. Jeffrey Pease, 36, a self-described "tech nerd with an MBA" and the company's director of information services, figured at most just five of the biggest conferences they do every year would choose Web-based services.

How wrong he was. Five signed on within a few months. By the end of 1998, 16 had demanded online registration. And of course, many clients had special requests: One wanted to exempt employees from credit-card payment, another to knock off $50 for groups of five or more. So great was the demand, Meetings Plus founder Carolyn West had to hire a consultant and add two more staffers to manage the workload. And they've retrained other employees to work on the Web.

Now, Pease estimates that 80% of the 12,000 conference-goers his company processes this year will sign up on the Web. It cost about $20,000 to set up the system, $10,000 for the home page, and an additional $1,100 a month for hosting and high-speed T1 lines.

But it's well worth it. Both Meetings Plus and its clients love working on the Web, because it has proven faster, easier, and cheaper. For example, it's eliminated the problems of time-zone differences. Registrants for Autodesk's Bangkok conference, for instance, could sign up without staying up all night--and with less chance of having their names misspelled. Future plans include putting up maps to allocate space on a trade-show floor, as well as posting speakers' bios, local menus, and other information.

"We had to do it to gain a competitive edge. Now, we'd have to do it to be competitive at all," adds Pease.

By Edith Updike with A.T. Palmer

This article was originally published in the May 24, 1999 print edition of Business Week's frontier. To subscribe, please see our subscription policy.

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