Well, wait a second: Have we heard of record breaking innovations by Concur? Oh yes, they offer Triplink an open platform where everybody can hook into – what an innovation.
And then they paid $120 million for the email parsing tool TripIt. What a waste – is it really so hard to parse a little bit of data from an HTML email? They also acquired traveler tracking and communications platform conTgo. And then there is Cliqbook the leading corporate booking engine. A great piece of technology – right? Well, it cost $2 billion – it better be good.
But is it really that good or is it just one of many products out there? How flexible is it? What happens if you want customization? I spare you the things I heard on industry events about customer service. You stand in line for years waiting for a little change or even to fix a bug. In the end most companies surrender and adjust – but maybe that’s why it fits so well to SAP … Isn’t it that every SAP client needs to adjust their business processes and workflow to SAP’s technology instead of the other way around?
Why Concur?
Well, all in all I can only say I’m quite surprised: A company which hasn’t made profit in years being acquired at such high stake. It proofs once again that one does not have to be profitable in the M&A game, nor have good assets, not even have well designed and flexible technology, or good customer service, all that counts is a big customer base. We learned that with Facebook, Whatsapp and so many others.
Me on the other hand, I’m looking forward to the future. It just looks like a big elephant of business travel solutions just became bigger, older and less flexible. So it will become easier for us to convince more and more unhappy Concur clients from the flexibility of our solution paired with customer centric focus.
Image by Kritchanut
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Regardless of the stock price. Paying over 12X revenue is a travesty. SAP will never see an ROI on this transaction.