Last week, I had the opportunity to attend Concurs annual event in Las Vegas, Fusion 2013. An event that has become a focal point for the corporate travel industry involved more than 2,000 attendees and a growing number of partners including travel suppliers, travel technology providers and travel management companies. Today’s article is going to focus on some of the exciting things going on at Concur and how this technology provider has become a driving force in this industry over the last 20 years and how it plans to continue driving innovation for the next 20.
Concur, as many may know, is a leading provider of (corporate) travel booking and expense management solutions (57% of the F500 use either Concur travel or expense). The company’s relentless pursuit to create what they call “The Perfect Trip” has led them through a journey of innovation that is unmatched in the industry and is what continues to drive the company and its solutions forward.
Over the last 20 years, as a technology provider Concur has played an important role in the corporate travel industry. They were one of the first to offer an end-to-end T&E solution which integrated travel booking and expense management. This was made possible by the acquisition of Outtask and following the success of this offering, they seized an opportunity to become a dominant player in the industry by making more acquisitions that not only positioned the company for further growth but added a broad range of capabilities. Some of those acquisitions included, Gelco, Etap-Online, Tripit, Global Expense and more recently ConTgo. To date the company has also invested significant amount in R&D to ensure that its solutions are on the forefront of technology and more importantly continue to meet the ever growing needs of the business traveler.
Needless to say Concur has enjoyed significant success in the industry, however, they are certainly not stopping anytime soon. According to executives Steve Singh (CEO), Rajeev Singh (President& COO) and Mike Hilton (EVP Strategy) they are only scratching the surface of this enormous global market and the company’s strategy to grow and penetrate this market further over the next couple of years is focused on three main areas.
- Concur T&E Cloud – This is an open cloud-based platform that connects customers, travel suppliers, solution providers, mobile developers and other partners enabling them to access Concurs T&E data to build value-added applications and offer them to Concur users. For example, the mobile developer that created Taxi Magic (an online taxi booking tool) made it available to Concur users and through the T&E Cloud Taxi Magic is able to link to the traveler’s itinerary information and provide receipt information that can go directly into the user’s expense items. Similarly travel suppliers or other solution providers can offer tools through the T&E Cloud. These offering are delivered to the user through the Concurs App Center.
- Concur App Center – Concur understands that it cannot deliver all the solutions that an organization and its business travelers need, it can however, provide a platform through which these solutions and innovations are delivered to Concur users. For example, there are “Apps for my company” such as Visage which can for example track employee wireless bills or FareIQ which monitors price variations on airfare from ticketing through departure and sends alerts when the price drops. Currently, there are 30 apps listed for clients and their employees. For the companies that want to develop apps, the Concur Connect Platform is the place to go. Here, technical support and training is available as well as co-marketing and promotional activities in an effort to drive down the cost of development.
- Open Booking – Concur introduced Open Booking last year and emphasized it further at this year’s event. With Open Booking Concur is attempting to help its clients reduce non-compliant travel spend specifically in cases when employees book direct from a suppliers website instead of using the corporate booking tool/service. The way it works is as follows. Through the T&E Cloud, travel suppliers that chose to participate in Open Booking (many have already including Avis, IHG, Marriott, Starwood, Hertz, etc) will be able to link a Concur users profile to a booking made through their website. For this to happen the traveler must link their Concur profile to their loyalty account for the participating travel supplier (e.g., Marriott Rewards). By doing this, the supplier is able to apply the appropriate corporate discount and any e-receipts generated are linked back to Concur. For Open Booking to be a success, a majority of the travel suppliers must participate and while the theory behind it may be sound, only time will tell us how successful this offering will be. I expect that those that are interested will continue to test Open Booking in a controlled environment in order to monitor the results before rolling it out company wide.
- The Perfect Trip Fund – In November 2012, Concur announced a $150 million “Perfect Trip” fund which is focused on investing and supporting emerging travel focused start-ups. Brilliantly, this is Concurs way of staying involved and connected to innovations that are happening throughout the industry and make them available for their users when appropriate. Some of the companies Concur has invested in include Evature, developer of the Expert Virtual Agent (EVA) which similar to Siri provides voice-activated search capabilities for online travel. Others include buuteeq, Room 77, Cleartrip and Nor1.
A lot of great stuff from Concur and yet another great event. There is still more however, stay tuned for Part 2 which will dig into the capabilities that a recent acquisition (ConTgo) will bring around mobile communications and messaging, how Concur plans to do deliver Big Data and gamification capabilities through the T&E Cloud and last but certainly not least a few updates on the Invoice offering.
