Concur announced a re-branding of their name to SAP Concur and a new company logo to match. SAP agreed to acquire Concur in September 2014 and the deal was finished by December for $8.4 billion. This timeline is very similar to that of SAP Ariba. SAP acquired Ariba in May 2012 and then changed the name to SAP Ariba in January 2016. SAP followed a similar path with SuccessFactors (Dec 2011 to Jan 2016).
The continued growth and success of SAP’s other lines of business show that the road ahead for SAP Concur looks very promising. The slightly more accelerated path with Concur (compared to Ariba and SuccessFactors) may well indicate that SAP’s M&A group has become ever more efficient…. or maybe they saved that much time by using Concur T&E instead of their legacy ERP based solution? Could be a whitepaper in the making here.
As part of the announcement, Concur err SAP Concur is focusing on the branding as a way to increase scale, provide more powerful solutions and leverage a more connected experience. In 2017 this has been very visible for SAP Concur customers using native integration to SAP financials. My hope is that 2018 will do the same for HR data from SAP SuccessFactors.
What else in in store for 2018? Expect the ‘powerful solutions’ and ‘greater scale’ to materialize as an increased focus on Concur’s invoicing capabilities and perhaps our first tastes of Concur transitioning it’s spend data solutions to SAP HANA analytics. With SAP’s drive to HANA and a name change to SAP Concur, the shift away from the IBM Cognos BI tool is fast approaching.
