By Freya Purnell
SAP America has entered an agreement to acquire travel and expense management software leader Concur, extending its reach into the US$1.2 trillion corporate travel market.
Using an open platform to connect the corporate travel ecosystem, including airlines, hotels and car rental companies, Concur has more than 23,000 customers, 4200 employees and 25 million active users in over 150 countries. With the acquisition, SAP’s business network, the world’s largest, is expected to transact more than US$600 billion annually.
The Concur board of director has unanimously approved the transaction, which is valued at approximately US$8.3 billion, with the acquisition expected to close in the fourth quarter 2014 or the first quarter 2015.
“The acquisition of Concur is consistent with our relentless focus on the business network,” said Bill McDermott, CEO of SAP. “We are making a bold move to innovate the future of business within and between companies. With Ariba, Fieldglass and Concur, SAP is the undisputed business network company. We are redefining how businesses conduct commerce across goods and services, contingent workforces, travel and entertainment. With the SAP HANA platform, the possibilities to innovate new business models around Concur and the network are limitless.”
Concur CEO Steve Singh said, “We have always been focused on making solutions for real customer problems, and with SAP we have a great opportunity to advance that mission. We are constantly seeking innovative ways to deliver the best customer experience and we’re excited about leveraging SAP technology, including HANA as we scale globally.”
Concur expects to leverage SAP HANA to enable real-time network collaboration to create new business models and simplify the complexity in the business travel value chain. Currently, only 30 per cent of Concur customers run SAP.
SAP will migrate all its corporate travel and expense management to Concur’s integrated solutions, and together the companies will build network-based, context-aware mobile applications to better meet the needs of mobile business travellers.
