SAP agrees to buy expense software maker Concur for $7.3B

http://in.reuters.com/article/2014/09/19/concur-tech-sap-se-ma-idINL6N0RJ5G020140919

by loganfrederick • 12 years ago

36 45 12 years ago

in.reuters.com

ccozan• 12 years ago

I wonder what will happen with TripIt. Can anyone comment on this?

struct• 12 years ago

I can see the email from HR right now: "To access Concur, go to the SAP Portal"

Nnnnooooooo!

linker3000• 12 years ago

...and type /SCNCCX

I really believe corporates only put up with such a shitty UI because 'we spent soooo much money on it, we'd better use it'.

/Hates every minute of working with our SAP system

msie• 12 years ago

I was trying to investigate what Concur was about and went to their website. They don't show any screenshots of the program (programs?). You have to give contact details to try out their program (so their sales team can contact you I guess). You have to give contact details to download any brochures about their products. Ugh.

martijn_himself3• 12 years ago

'Enterprise' software is not designed to be accessible.

arethuza• 12 years ago

I think in many cases 'Enterprise' software simply isn't designed at all - it just sort coalesces out of the darkness and the screams of thousands of tormented users.

gibeath• 12 years ago

At its core, it's a handy suite for submitting expense reports. There's a nice mobile app that lets you capture receipts from your cell phone camera, and a team of (presumably offshore) auditors that will catch the most glaring errors on submissions. Generally, it's more pleasant than dealing with the typical AP department.

I haven't really played with the TripIt integration or other bells AMD whistles.

hippich• 12 years ago

My employer uses Concur for expenses reports, and I had to use it once... My experience with it was terrible.

- UI - I could figure it out, but I bet many people will find it super confusing - Tickets were bought via mentioned TripIt, but they required me to find some kind of receipt to approve this expense, even so tickets were booked through them - Their support is very slow and very un-precise. And absence of support precision in such a horrible system is bad.

But I guess they are just like SAP. They don't have to demo it or make it better. They already got name and can just push garbage down throat of other large enterprises.

jfoster3• 12 years ago

Your frustrations are because you are not their target customer. They really don't care for individuals trying out their software the first time. They certainly don't anticipate selling it to you without you talking to their sales team.

JunkDNA• 12 years ago

This is entirely unsurprising if you've spent time around enterprise software. I once worked in a very large, global (non-IT) company that was interested in software made by a very well-known, large, global IT company. We wanted to see a demo of their product. They pushed back saying "we don't need to do a demo, we're XYZ company you know we can do it. A demo isn't worth our time. If you want a demo, we will have to charge you $XX,000 of professional services". My employer at the time paid it.

rokhayakebe• 12 years ago

we don't need to do a demo, we're XYZ company you know we can do it

I think this just made my day.

jacques_chester3• 12 years ago

I use Concur as part of my job.

It is stunningly, stupefyingly awful.

However, it is popular with the kind of hyperglobocom companies that SAP deals with.

I can submit expense reports (which take about as long as it would to scratch them into clay tablets) and I can book travel. That's about it.

I imagine that -- for the anonymous finance dept folk who delight in taking weeks to examine my reports while I am legally on the hook for the credit card bill -- it is very featuresome and powerful. As an end user I hate it with the power of a thousand exploding suns.

The mobile app for capturing receipts makes it slightly, slightly more tolerable. Slightly. But half the time it doesn't work. And I still have to go into Concur and manually line up about half of the receipts anyway.

In conclusion, somebody please put these guys out of business with a post-1998 web app. You will be both billionaires and heroes.

ddddarti• 12 years ago

We use Nexonia. Web app is ok, mobile app is good.

(I don't work for Nexonia, I work for a company that uses it)

jfoster3• 12 years ago

I have horrible memories of needing to switch back-and-forth between the Concur mobile app and the desktop version to submit expenses. The mobile app was very convenient for uploading photos of receipts, but as you mentioned, half the time the upload just sat there. It wasn't feature-complete enough to submit the expense claims directly from mobile, so I'd go in and fix up fields on the desktop.

The people who have to use this software the most (employees) would never willingly purchase it, but they are not the decision-makers for this purchase. A competitor might be able to gain traction by targeting small-but-growing companies that wish for a nicer future for their employees.

abakker2• 12 years ago

There are some companies doing this - Expensify, for one.

I've no doubt that there are others. I know some outsourcers of HR services, like TriNet have some modern capabilities.

eitally• 12 years ago

The core problem I have is that you cannot start a new expense report linked to an existing approved trip using the mobile app. You HAVE to start it from the web, which is a horrifyingly bad experience ... then you can continue it on the mobile app. If you start the report on the mobile app, it is nearly impossible to link it to the correct trip (unless you leave it in limbo and then go into the web app, start a new one, then link the existing one you created on the mobile app to it). Ugh.

But yeah, it's a cost savings system and has nothing to do with enterprise IT. Finance are the ones who demand it.

martijn_himself3• 12 years ago

The problem is: these applications are not designed with the end user in mind. They are always designed to convince the CTO/ CFO/ whoever is in charge of spending the annual IT budget. The designer is rewarded to increase the complexity of the app and add meaningless features to justify spending the millions of dollars that are usually associated with these contracts.

SAP is not buying this because it is a wonderful piece of software engineering, it is buying it for the CTO/ CFO contacts it can now target to sell other SAP products to.

dangoor• 12 years ago

I remember filling out Excel spreadsheets for expense reports and attaching a bunch of receipts and sending them in. Concur is better than that, at least.

My experience with Concur has actually been better than my previous experience with Shoeboxed because Concur is tied to my corporate AmEx card... there are actually very few expenses that I need to do much manual touchup on.

jacques_chester3• 12 years ago

Even with a company Amex and with the receipt app, it still regularly takes me hours to submit a report for even a short trip.

smackfu2• 12 years ago

I kind of feel like an expense reporting system is like an iceberg: the end-user UI is just the tip that is visible.

Like here are things that you don't see as a user:

* Data feeds from various providers, each with their own formats.

* Rules-engines to route for auditing.

* Auditing UIs.

* Management reporting.

* Fraud analytics.

* Feeds to accounting systems.

* Feeds to payroll and corporate card providers.

* Support for constantly changing laws around taxation in various countries.

Those are all actually complex things that need to exist to be competitive for an enterprise system. Your fancy UI is one checkbox, but you're not getting the contract against someone who does all those other things.

jacques_chester3• 12 years ago

All those things are fanciful nonsense if users either avoid entering data, delay entering data or fudge data entry because the system is heroically terrible.

joanatello2• 12 years ago

Try out Expensify - it's a post-2000 expense web and mobile app (already way above your expectations right?)

Seriously though, Expensify is an expense reporting solution that simplifies the process for all users invoved - employees, submitters, administrators, finance departments, HR, and the companies themselves (tax reporting, etc). Our goal is to completely change the way people do expense reports (for how we work, check out: http://blog.expensify.com/2014/07/29/how-do-you-expensify-fo...).

PS - If it's not obvious yet, I currently work at Expensify and am totally drinking the kool aid. BUT, our vision for the space is completely user driven and goes beyond a simple expense reporting solution, which makes things trés exciting around here.

On @martijn_himself's point, Expensify's business model employs a bottom-up approach. We offer a free version of Expensify for individual users to try out first, and we have found that many individual users like our product enough to introduce it into their company; in fact, that's how we've been able to fill our pipeline since we launched. User feedback actually helps us figure out what features to build next.

Take a look, try us out! use.expensify.com

PPS - we're hiring engineers if you're into this sort of thing http://we.are.expensify.com/who-we-need/

martijn_himself3• 12 years ago

I do realise I am quite cynical in my comments but FWIW I do like the look of your product- it seems to be 'leaner' and more targeted towards usability.

vosper• 12 years ago

The company I work at used to use Expensify, and then we got acquired and now we've been switched to Concur, courtesy of our new corporate overlords.

As someone who expenses occasionally (some months I have nothing, others I've gone on a work trip and I have 30 receipts) I found Expensify a little confusing at first, but with zero training I figured out how it works.

Concur, as everyone here says, sucks. The web UI is bloated and confusing, and especially the flight booking system is awful (and stupid - it's more expensive than using Kayak, and is harder to use). The mobile app does make things a bit better, but I know everyone here would go back to Expensify if they could.

I have no affiliation with Expensify, just my 2c.

zippergz• 12 years ago

Interesting. I actually think it's pretty good. But maybe that's just because I was previously using Oracle Financials for expense reports. After that, anything seems amazing.

aunty_helen• 12 years ago

Ok so this is the third time I've drafted a comment about SAP and the enterprise landscape to try explain this and all I can now think of is GRRRRR!!!

To avoid a the down votes, I should probably mention that you have to experience the enterprise landscape firsthand to be able to comprehend why it is. (That's it, 'why it is').

mtmail• 12 years ago

I would've loved to read a long comment with background on the current enterprise landscape. Even a rant or unpopular opinion. The "GRRRR!!" itself doesn't tell me much.

_pmf_• 12 years ago

To give a brief impression, two things:

- parts of the server side SAP components communicate via telnet

- the user interface of SAP requires users to navigate between different dialogs/forms by manually entering a so-called transaction code (p.e. http://www.tcodesearch.com/)

Osmium• 12 years ago

I really, really do not understand that website you linked to. I feel like enterprise software is so far out of the realm of my experience that it may as well be another planet. It makes me feel like I don't understand computers anymore or what they're meant to do. I don't understand why it's necessary?

omnibrain• 12 years ago

Manually entering them is only the "shortcut" (at least nowadays).

After logging in the user should see a User menu (tree form) filled with entries depending on his given role. If there are no entries then it's the administrator's/consutlant's/integrator's fault and not SAP's fault. Additionally you can add transaction to your Favorites by simply rightclicking the "Favorites" menu entry and clicking on Insert Transaction. You can even sort and rename your favorites.

smackfu2• 12 years ago

Wonder how IBM feels about this development. From May: "IBM will cease operating Global Expense Reporting Solutions as a standalone product, effective March 31, 2016, and instead will refer customers to Concur."

http://www.businesstravelnews.com/More-News/IBM-will-cease-o...

abakker2• 12 years ago

It is likely that SAP will bring Concur in as a SuccessFactors module, which means it will get integrated to the rest of the suite over their HANA Cloud Platform. In the long term, this is likely to result in much better integration to their cloud based systems than they would have had in their legacy/on-premises systems. It is also likely that it will take significant time for them to fully integrate it with their existing solutions, and to be able to sell it. Ultimately, this acquisition will bolster short-term cloud revenues, and help give its existing enterprise clients a reason to move toward HANA.

eranation• 12 years ago

I'm using it at work on a daily basis almost. Their expense + flight / hotel booking system is surprisingly OK relative to enterprise software, they also have a mobile app which is pretty great.

It's quite a complex topic, lot's of corporate policies to enforce, and basically they had to develop all the tech facade that Kayak, Expedia etc have (flight and hotel booking) as well as a lot of financial logic for expenses.

There is a lot of money in enterprise software... I wish more YC startups would tackle that area...

brown_ghost• 12 years ago

So I wonder why Concur Government edition is so awful. I mean really, really, unusable.

thearn4• 12 years ago

Agreed. My agency just switched over, and it is 100% awful.

hkarthik• 12 years ago

There is a lot of money in enterprise software... I wish more YC startups would tackle that area.

Enterprise Software requires more much investment in Sales/Marketing so these companies often they invest a lot less in engineering.

YC companies historically tend to be more engineering-focused. Many are now going up market so you start to see more YC job posts for marketing and sales positions now so this is probably changing.

mtbcoder• 12 years ago

There is a lot of money in enterprise software... I wish more YC startups would tackle that area...

Unfortunately in enterprise-land, it's a tough sell for startups. No one in middle management wants to be that person who doesn't stick to the Status Quo when it comes to software purchasing or choosing which technologies to implement. "No one ever got fired for buying IBM" is the old saying I believe.

judgardner• 12 years ago

Enterprise is changing and people are getting fired for buying IBM.

http://www.computerworlduk.com/news/outsourcing/3275270/astr...

deedubaya• 12 years ago

Everyone here is complaining about Concur and how horrible it is... but it's all relative. If you think Concur is horrible, you should have seen the process before with in-house solutions which were both digital and analog.

It might not be perfect, but dayum is it better than where things used to be.

mathattack• 12 years ago

I worked at a large consultancy (who creates custom expense systems amongst other things) and their internal system was beyond awful, so I understand that other alternatives are pretty bad.

That said, my (small) company uses Excel, and the experience is much better than Concur.

Perhaps it's a case of a large customer base on a high margin business being more important than a good product.

SAP agrees to buy expense software maker Concur for $7.3B

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