Articles tagged “sap”

While business travel platforms go after the expense market, expense platform Coupa’s move in the other direction would give it plenty of cross-selling opportunities.

SAP has pared back its own business travel. It probably had those cuts in mind when it lowered forecasts for its Concur unit, which offers travel expense management software.

It isn't very unusual for a company like Hipmunk to get acquired and then to fade into oblivion in the clutches of a much larger corporation. That's the way it goes in the heartless mergers-and-acquisitions game.

Most corporate travelers would rather think about anything else than booking and expensing travel. That's why companies are scrambling to help reduce that pain point for road warriors. We expect Coupa, Certify, Chrome River, and SAP Concur to acquire more travel tech companies to help seize the opportunity.

Six years after brashly boasting about how it would disrupt travel search, Hipmunk, which had to compete against larger players with more ample war chests, is exiting into the business travel portfolio of Concur. Hipmunk's turn toward business travel may make it more of a business-to-business play than its current consumer incarnation. As Concur's TripIt example shows, it remains to be seen how innovative Hipmunk can be given larger corporate priorities within SAP/Concur.

Concur's travel and expense offerings are a high-profile element of SAP's portfolio rather than blending into oblivion. SAP has not shut down Concur's Perfect Trip Fund and continues to invest in travel startups.

Concur officials are saying all the right things about the future of the company under SAP ownership. Sometimes acquisitions don't turn out exactly as one or both of the parties intended, so we'll just have to wait and see how it all turns out.

What does it mean that there was only one bidder, SAP, for Concur? There are only a handful of companies -- perhaps Oracle, IBM, the Priceline Group, and American Express -- that have both the resources to pay more than $8 billion for an acquisition and have an interest in making a business out of travel technology for corporations. In addition, Concur still has plenty of skeptics.

Strategic differences between American Express and Concur didn't stop American Express from investing in the growing company, and it will vote in favor of the merger and make a windfall.

The SAP-ization of Concur won't begin in earnest until after the acquisition closes toward the end of this year or early in 2015. Decisions haven't been made yet as to how their overlapping products will blend together.