Concur, Oracle Push B2B Portals

<B>Concur, Oracle Push B2B Portals</B>
<I>Third In A Three-Part Series On Electronic Commerce Purchasing</I>

By Cheryl Rosen

Spring has come early to the business-to-business purchasing arena, and a verdant crop of e-commerce announcements, alliances and initiatives is sprouting. The newest offerings for business travel buyers come from Concur Technologies and Oracle Corp.

The Concur Business Advantage will consolidate purchasing for small and midsize companies, negotiate discounts with suppliers and run orders through Concur's workflow and approval process. Already a player in automated expense reporting, Concur brings powerful new partners to this effort, including Microsoft--which will offer "marketing and research and development resources"--and Nortel Networks and Safeco, each of which invested $35 million.

Oracle went even a step further, true to its long-held vision of a future in which self-service purchasing moves off the PC and into the employee's hand.

At a decidedly glitz-free press conference in New York last month, Oracle chairman and CEO Larry Ellison launched OracleMobile.com, an Oracle spinoff designed to allow corporations to easily port their Internet and intranet sites to mobile devices at little cost. On its Web site (Oramobile.com), travelers can make and change travel and restaurant reservations, access flight information and driving directions, check their stocks, and order books and magazines. Oracle will partner with Sabre on the site for travel booking--interesting, given that it owns Oracle E-Travel--and with Motorola Inc. for speech recognition applications.

Bringing to the travel booking arena a system that recognizes human speech will be an important element, as travelers likely will not want to type large amounts of data into their telephone key pads. While the travel industry long has tried to deliver a workable speech recognition system, Ellison said "all OracleMobile.com's services will be voice-enabled over the next couple of months, so you can do these things with any phone."

Corporations can buy Oracle's software to translate their Web sites into WAP sites, or let Oracle host everything for them, adding their own intranet content to that offered by OracleMobile. For travel managers, that means Oracle will translate your travel home page to make it accessible on wireless devices "at an extremely low cost, so that price is not a barrier," Ellison said. "I wouldn't say it's free, but it's close." Oracle will depend on transaction fees from suppliers to help cover its costs.

Ellison--who in 1996 was ridiculed by the computer industry for predicting the demise of the PC and the growth of "network computers" linked to the Internet--took the opportunity to bask in the popularity of the thinnest of thin clients, the telephone and the pager. Today 140 million people use the Internet and 400 million use wireless--and by 2001, he predicted those numbers will soar to 230 million Internet customers and a billion wireless ones. By 2003, half of all customers accessing the Internet will be doing so over a device other than a computer.

Oracle already has spun off a business unit charged with turning televisions into Internet appliances, Ellison said, and OracleMobile.com will do the same for the telephone. It will use its own Portal-To-Go software, which maps existing Internet content onto the smaller, black-and-white screens of the telephone and soon, a voice-enabled interface designed to minimize typing by offering one or two options. He expects OracleMobile.com to go public before year-end.

Meanwhile, Concur promises its Concur Business Advantage will deliver discounts of "up to 65 percent" on computer hardware and software, office supplies and travel to small and midsize companies by leveraging their buying power with that of Concur, Nortel, Safeco and their corporate customers. GetThere.com will provide travel services.

The point, said Concur commerce network division president Rob Reid, is to "help employees automate the tactical tasks so they can concentrate on adding strategic value in the organization. What we've done is utilize partners like Nortel and Safeco and GetThere.com to go in and work with suppliers to get the best rates, and we're leveraging those negotiations and extending them to all the people who come into our network."

Concur alone has 325 customers with a total of 2.4 million employees it hopes to bring to the network, and Nortel and Safeco--an insurance and leasing company, respectively--have "hundreds of thousands more," Reid said.

And--as many travel managers know--consolidating purchasing brings positive rewards beyond negotiated discounts, said director of strategic development Susan MacPherson, who pointed to data reporting, "so you know who's buying what and how often." For suppliers, the introduction of new customers and the benefits of better data reporting and simpler management outweigh the potential loss from lowering prices.

Customers are sent to suppliers' sites to make purchases, then back to the Concur application "to go through normal workflow and approval procedures."

Internet discounts also are going to change the business model for of a lot of corporations, Reid acknowledged. "There's so much competition because anybody can reach anybody, and I can see where a lot of corporations are concerned about what's going to happen to their pricing volume. But if they don't step up, someone else will. Suppliers are saying go ahead and extend the discounts and bring us the incremental business at a lower acquisition cost."

The Concur Business Advantage is available at no cost to customers of Concur's eWorkplace electronic commerce solution. That software can be bought from Concur or licensed through an ASP model for $300 to $5,000 a month, depending on company size.

In other B2B news, Sabre and Ariba announced last week the third-quarter launch of a 5-year venture to create and maintain a new Sabre e-Marketplace targeted at saving participants--including airlines, agencies, hotels and car rental companies--10 to 15 percent on the products and services they purchase.

"The biggest benefit for many companies is that they will realize global economies of scale and minimize or eliminate maverick purchasing. By channeling purchasing power to Sabre e-Marketplace, they will realize significant volume purchasing discounts," said William Hannigan, Sabre's new president and CEO.

Though not directly involved, corporate travel managers could benefit from the portal as their suppliers take advantage of cost-cutting opportunities.

Ariba's global B2B eCommerce platform also backs EDS CoNext, another recently announced targeting consortia purchasing (<I>BTN</I>, Jan. 24).