After spending the better part of last week in Las Vegas at SAP Ariba Live, this week I headed to the beautiful Pacific Northwest to attend the SAP Concur Fusion in Seattle and wanted to share my thoughts and impressions of the event. The conference was well attended with over 3,000 participants making it one of the larger travel, expense, and invoicing events in North America. The conference has grown steadily over the past decade as SAP Concur has grown and prospered. One happy Concur user I shared a ride with to the airport commented that she has been coming to these events for nine years and in the early years there were only a few hundred attendees. While she missed the intimacy of those early years, she also really liked what the conference has grown into today.
I liked that Fusion had equal amounts of sessions, content, and demos for each of their three core offerings: Concur Travel, Concur Expense, and Concur Invoice. Each solution was well represented at the conference. The feedback from the customers and partners that I spoke with was overall very positive. Many noted that they liked the direction the company is heading, and how SAP Concur is looking at leveraging new technologies to make their jobs easier and more productive. While there were many topics discussed over the course of the week-long event, from my perspective, three main themes permeated throughout. They were – 1) delivering value to customers, 2) data analytics, and 3) the partner ecosystem. I discuss each of these below.
Delivering Value to Customers
Over the course of the conference I had the opportunity to speak with and listen to presentations from many of the SAP Concur leadership team. The underlying theme in almost every discussion was how can we deliver more value to our customers, make them more productive, and provide them with a better user experience. The enhancements they are making to existing solutions, (Concur Invoice, Concur Expense, Concur Travel) as well as the new solutions they are rolling out (Concur Detect, Concur Locate, Concur Analytics) very much appear to keep this objective in mind. With millions of SAP Concur users worldwide, SAP Concur knows that every second of time they save their users can translate into millions of dollars of potential productivity gains.
Technology is at the core of how SAP Concur drives more value to its customers. Over the course of the week we heard many of the ways they are leveraging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), SAP Leonardo, and Bots, to move the needle to not only improve their existing solutions, but also when creating new solutions such as Concur Detect, Concur Locate, and Concur Budget.
One of the new technologies The SAP Concur Labs team showed us was an AI-powered bot that might one day take the place of a human assistant. The conversational interface being piloted (developed in conjunction with Slack) is aimed at helping a person plan and book travel, create and approve an expense report, and ensure compliancy with travel procedures. While this is not ready for prime time yet, you can expect to see and hear more about it in the near future. We also heard how SAP Concur is looking at using AI technology as a way to augment (or better yet, replace) OCR for data capture with their invoicing solutions.
Data Analytics
Discussions and sessions on analytics permeated the conference. SAP Concur has recently introduced Concur Analytics, a brand new solution aimed at providing data analysis capabilities to all users of their solutions. Some of the features include – an easy-to-use UI, out-of-the-box customizable reports, real-time access to data, scheduled reports, and automatic alerts. I expect this new tool to have a strong uptake with SAP Concur’s SMB clients who today most likely aren’t using a similar tool and don’t want to or don’t have time to learn how to use another solution. SAP Concur Analytics was built from the ground up and is integrated directly into the Concur UI that customers are familiar with already. For SAP Concur’s larger clients that are already using Cognos from IBM, the uptake will take longer but I think Concur Analytics’ appeal to end-users will hasten that migration over time. Spend Management goes hand in hand with data analytics, and while there was some mention of spend management at the conference, I expect to hear and see a whole lot more on this topic at next year’s conference and the months and years ahead especially as it relates to invoicing and expense management.
Partner Ecosystem
Many others in the industry are catching on to what SAP Concur has known for years: having an open ecosystem and a platform that supports it, provides better value, growth, stickiness, and ultimately usage of its own solutions. On display in the Fusion exhibit hall were over 60 ecosystem partners that provide solutions for, among other things, travel management (Direct Travel, The Parking Spot), Visa compliance (CIBT), tax/VAT management (Sovos, Avalara), and payment options (Nvoicepay, Comdata, American Express). By one account I heard, over 50 million users have access to and can leverage the SAP Concur ecosystem. End-user interest in SAP Concur ecosystem partners was high as evidenced by the steady foot traffic in the exhibit hall throughout the conference.
As I wrote about in my column last week, SAP Ariba is one of those companies moving towards a more open and welcoming network/platform. I have no doubt that Barry Padgett’s move from SAP Concur to SAP Ariba will help hasten the transition for them.
Final Thoughts
SAP Concur Fusion was an impressive and massive undertaking. It is easily one of the largest such conferences in the industry. The event has grown steadily over the years and I have little doubt, given what I saw and heard this week, that it will continue along this path going forward. Driving value and placing customers first is a proven recipe for success and SAP Concur seems to embody this philosophy. The growth of their customer base along with their revenues would seem to indicate the marketplace agrees. Stay tuned for more in-depth coverage in the coming months.
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