Earlier this week, I was in Las Vegas for Concur’s annual user conference, Fusion. Concur, a provider of travel and expense management solutions (also ePayables solutions) has become such a dominant force in the travel and expense management space that its user conference typically offers more interesting content drawn from a wider array of professionals than the annual events hosted by the big travel industry member associations. This year was no different and with more than 2,000 attendees and 65 business sponsors, there was something for everyone.
What I particularly enjoy about this conference is the opportunity to meet with the Concur executives as a group and one-on-one and hear their views on the market and where they believe their company and the industry are headed.
Concur turned 20 this year and rather than bask in the success of going from $0 to $500 million in annual cloud-based revenue over that time, CEO and Chairman, Steve Singh prefers to think about Concur’s next 20 years. There are several themes that he believes will drive Concur and the industry over the next two decades:
1. An application-centric view of technology fails to deliver a whole solution. Steve believes that providers need to solve an end-to-end problem and automate an entire business process. Doing so will enable Concur to continue to grow and make it indispensable to its customers.
2. At 9% of global GDP, the overall travel market is huge – Concur is barely scratching the surface of its potential market penetration.
3. The travel supply chain will continue to evolve and Concur has the opportunity to redefine it by adding value to the participants on both sides – the travelers (or buyers) who consume the services and the suppliers who serve them.
4. Travel search will eventually integrate with the transaction. In general, Steve believes that search has begin to move away from an advertising-based model and towards one that is transaction-based. More and more searches that are done within specific portals (like Zillow, Bankrate, or Yelp) continue to creep closer and closer to the actual transaction.
If Steve was able to paint a vision for Concur’s next 20 years, his brother, Rajeev, Concur’s President and COO, focused on Concur’s top three priorities for the next year: (1) Concur’s T&E Cloud, (2) The Perfect Trip and (3) Open Booking
The T&E Cloud is Concur’s open platform that plays host to its own cloud-based solutions and serves as the backbone to a network that serves and attracts the travel suppliers (hotels, cars, airlines, etc.), solution partners, mobile developers, and travelers. With 15,000 customers and close to 20 million users, any centralized Concur site will be hugely attractive to the companies that sell to corporate travel, procurement, and accounts payable departments and/or sell to business travelers. The value of such a large network of business travelers is immediately appealing to the travel suppliers and Concur’s solution partners who are always looking for large pools of prospects. The T&E cloud presents an opportunity for these suppliers to engage a huge number of prospects directly and in the context of their travel – as a result, they become “highly qualified” prospects.
The same opportunity holds true for mobile developers (after all, by definition a business traveler is mobile) which is why Concur has developed and launched the Concur App Center which it announced during the conference (click here to read the PR). Thirty mobile apps are available within the APP Center at its launch and many more are expected. But, Concur does not view its T&E Cloud as merely a sales platform for its partners to reach its end users; they understand that the key to this T&E Cloud (or network) is that it must also provide value to the travelers every time they visit. The ability to administer an App Center that is focused on one market segment (travel) and built around the innovations of third-parties is a very compelling idea [Sidebar: We believe that some of the Business Networks that we frequently discuss on these pages will eventually begin to develop similar ecosystems.].
For Concur, its second priority – The Perfect Trip – is an idealized vision of the world where business travel is a seamless experience, a perfect experience (similar in many ways to the Supply Chain’s “Perfect Order”). Raj quickly admits that the “Perfect Trip” does not exist today – travel is messy: travelers don’t know policies, companies can’t locate travelers, travel departments quickly lose control, and finance struggles to reconcile the expenses…… but, it doesn’t have to be. Rather than tilt at windmills and simply dream the impossible dream, Concur has decided to put its money where its vision is with the development of a $150 million “Perfect Trip” fund launched last fall. This fund will “invest in and nurture emerging companies in the T&E Cloud. Concur’s vision of The Perfect Trip is built on creating a travel ecosystem that dynamically responds to the needs of business travelers, the companies that they work for and the suppliers that serve them.”
Concur’s third priority, Open Booking, is actually a little controversial, particularly for those of us with strong sourcing and procurement backgrounds. Concur believes that compliance to travel policies is and will continue to be very difficult to manage (we agree) – as such, Concur is pushing its ‘Open Booking” capabilities which allow business travelers to book non-compliant travel within the Concur solution and have the data flow directly back to back-end systems and expense reports, to TMCs (travel management companies) and travel managers, and to procurement and accounts payable. Concur believes that the benefits of capturing the non-compliant travel data outweighs any implicit encouragement for travelers to book outside of policy. It is an interesting and very progressive idea and one that we’ll be tracking in the months and years ahead.
Congrats to the Concur team on another great event!
