CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up returns today with another assortment of complex spend management technology news and updates from the past month to share with our community. If you are a sourcing, procurement, or spend management solution provider and you have news to share with us, please drop us a note at editor at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!
Expense Management Tech Industry’s Next Big Move: Major Consolidation
Just yesterday, it was announced that K1 Investments, a global investment firm focused on enterprise software, was a majority backer ($125MM) in a merger that brings together four of the world’s top expense management platforms, including Certify Software, Expensewatch, Nexonia, and Tallie. This is perhaps the biggest news in the growing expense management software market since global software giant SAP purchased Concur back in late 2014.
The new, combined entity (which will support all existing product lines and customer bases) will serve, as a whole, over 7,500 clients across a varieity of industries (Marketo, FitBit, Century 21, and Little Caesar’s are just a handful of the large clients across the four solutions). It is expected that this new joint company will be able to react to the new and dynamic challenges of the evolving travel and expense management market, including (but not limited to) the need for greater visibility via next-generation analytics, lively mobile applications for both automating expense report creation and approval, and supporting the greater objectives of finance teams across the globe.
In a statement to CPORising.com, Certify Software CEO Bob Neveau said: “It is exciting to bring these software solutions together into a family of brands to meet the various market needs – we are truly stronger together. From SMB to global enterprise, we have the products to align with the customer’s needs, and this will resonate in the marketplace as we deploy our multi-brand strategy.”
Of course, this new, combined entity will hope to achieve what very few other platforms in this industry have had the power, breadth, innovation, and size to do effectively: compete at the same level as the space’s leader, SAP Concur.
Beeline Adds Genesys’ “Talent Clouds” to its Ecosystem of Partners
Also this week, Beeline, one of the world’s largest providers of Vendor Management System (VMS) technology, announced its new strategic partnership with Genesys Talent, an innovator in cloud-based talent pool/talent channel management.
Utilizing demographic- and skillset-specific requirements, the Talent Clouds offering helps businesses curate deep, company-specific talent pools that have been pre-qualified from quality, skillset, and enterprise alignment perspectives. This new partnership will bolster the talent engagement attributes of Beeline’s unique self-sourcing functionality and allow its customers to access a growing and expanding pool of top-level, highly-skilled talent.
This new strategic partnership is a technological representation of a growing trend in the greater contingent workforce management (CWM) market: the ability for procurement and human capital practitioners to enable a more direct relationship between itself and its talent.
“One of the most exciting things about Genesys’ model is how they carefully curate talent clouds specific to a client’s needs. These talent clouds can enable cost savings, faster fill times, and higher quality. Additionally, Genesys does a great job caring for the workers and this helps enhance our mutual clients’ status as employers of choice,” said Brian Hoffmeyer, GVP of Marketing Strategies at Beeline.
Coupa and Sabre Continue to Collaborate on Travel and Expense Management
Last month, Coupa Software (NASDAQ: Coup), the San Francisco-based provider of supply management solutions in the cloud, reaffirmed its collaboration with Sabre Corporation (NASDAQ: SABR) to simplify the business travel experience for Coupa customers. Sabre, a Texas-based provider of T&E management solutions, has been working with Coupa for over a year on a venture to bring Sabre’s “GetThere” online business travel booking solution to Coupa’s cloud-based platform (click here to read our initial coverage of the partnership from May 2016). Now, the two companies are pleased to announce its general availability to customers, who can book business travel in “GetThere” and access itineraries, expenses, and receipts in the Coupa Open Business Network.
Deem Gets “Smart” with Travel and Expense Management
Also last month, Deem, the San Francisco-based provider of cloud-based expense management solutions, announced the release of Deem Intelligent Match, a new hotel bookings tool for its latest Work Fource platform. Deem Intelligent Match leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to improve user experience and “hotel attachment rates,” or the rate at which an employee books with a company-compliant or preferred hotel. The new offering scours company, user, and market data to understand preferences, patterns, and trends in the marketplace and assist employees with booking travel at compliant/preferred hotels. Booking with compliant or preferred hotels can save the enterprise money and reduce risk, but many business travelers disregard corporate booking policies or preferences because they cannot find a hotel in their corporate travel bookings program that they prefer. Deem Intelligent Match is said to bridge this gap and make business travel books a win-win for employer and employee.
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