Concur’s technology leaders have refocused on core infrastructure over innovation to deal with increased service disruptions during the past 18 months. “In the past we have had much more rapid development of features and functionality, but over the last few months we have slowed those down,” said senior vice president for hosting operations Stephen deRham. Speaking Tuesday during a… Read More »
It seems that some corporate travel decision-makers are endlessly dissatisfied with data. It’s imperfect, dumped on them in buckets and hard to present to executives. Nowadays they want insights at the trip level. They want to identify policy violations before it’s too late. They want to take more immediate action on predicted outcomes. Using travel data for predictive… Read More »
You may have read that as SAP swallows Concur, business travel innovation goes down with it. This is absurd. Concur is much more an expense management software company than a business travel company. Is it innovative? Yes, but that’s not how it got its travel cred. Concur has no monopoly on ingenuity and now, perhaps at its zenith,… Read More »
SAP expects the pricey acquisition of Concur to increase its earnings in 2016, but that seems possible only with massive revenue growth or layoffs. In its fiscal year ended this past September, Concur recorded non-GAAP pretax income of $56 million. [Using non-GAAP figures reduces the effect of non-recurring items and improves comparability of performance over time.] But SAP is… Read More »
SAP CEO Bill McDermott sees Concur’s TripLink supplier-direct program as a replacement for corporate travel policy. In an interview published last week by Re/code, McDermott responded as follows when asked why SAP is paying about $8 billion for Concur: “Every company has a corporate travel department, but no one wants to work with it. You can use . .… Read More »
Concur’s TripLink direct connect program could upend corporate travel distribution if it works. So far, it doesn’t. The TripLink concept resonates with corporate clients concerned about hotel booking channel compliance. About 35 percent of lodging bookings at companies with travel managers go outside the preferred channels, according to research by The Company Dime. Many of these are for… Read More »