Published on the 22/03/2017 | Written by Donovan Jackson
Plug in a few of your favourite business services…
The app centre is the delivery end of SAP-owned company Concur’s API, which has allowed a number (around 60) of local software providers to develop apps and services which integrate with the Concur mothership to ‘take better control of the business travel experience’.
Concur automates many of the most annoying aspects of travel by digitising, filing and allocating travel expenses ‘on the go’ through an app, rather than requiring employees to filter through piles of paper and trying to figure out just what the hell happened on that trip to Vegas.
Finding the app centre isn’t all that easy, however, as Concur’s PR people forgot to include the link in the press release. What’s more, Google will take you to the USA app center (sic) on the search term ‘Concur ANZ App Centre’. With some sleuthing, however, we got there eventually.
At the recent Tech Leaders Forum in Sydney, the company’s business dev director Murray Warner said companies are increasingly looking at operating ‘connected clouds’ where microservices would enable the construction of applications to meet specific business needs (we’ve covered the ‘composable enterprise’ before).
That is made possible through APIs, which provide access to information and services in one app, by the developers of another. In turn, the culmination of that is the App Centre, which said Concur, contains partner applications which help drive a ‘seamless’ (there’s an old and still annoying industry term) business travel and spend management experience.
Among the apps are usual suspects you’d expect to find, like MYOB, Xero, Uber, AirBNB and more, as well as less widely known ones like online food delivery service foodora and local taxi hailing app Ingogo.
By connecting a Concur account with other travel (and accounting) apps, eReceipts appear directly inside Concur, while other features are made possible like finding airline lounges or getting language and culture tips for the next destination.
Additionally, administrators can connect with applications that help prevent expense fraud or ensure compliance with industry regulations by leveraging data from Concur.
And that SAP ownership? It was back in 2014 that the big German paid over US$8-billion for Concur. Matt Goss, Australian MD, told iStart that things have gone pretty well for the American vendor since then. “SAP is a great partner, they’ve invested a lot into the business and they have let us get on with what we do best,” he said.
