Concur, TRX Cloud Technology Strategy

Concur and TRX in recent weeks have tailored their offerings for the newly launched Google Apps Marketplace, signaling a growing role of the cloud computing concept into travel management.

Concur in March launched a version of its expense management tool scaled for small businesses through the Google Apps Marketplace. The tool, Concur Breeze, leverages Concur technology to create expense reports though imported data from personal and corporate credit cards, allowing for automated submission, review and approval. It currently is available only to U.S. customers, but Concur plans to expand it to other regions by the end of the year.

Google for several years has marketed its own technology suite—which includes enhanced Gmail, calendar tools, and word processing tools—to businesses and reports more than 2 million business customers. Late last month, it launched the Google Apps Marketplace, allowing third-party technology suppliers, such as Concur, to integrate their applications in the Google platform. Concur later this year plans to further integrate its technology with Google's tools for enhanced data reporting and analysis capabilities, according to the company.

"Concur has removed all barriers to automation that previously existed within the market segment," according to Concur executive vice president and general manager of emerging business Elena Donio. "Now, any small business can experience the benefits of automated expense reporting."

Concur's move, like that of travel technology company TRX, which is in the process of moving some of its enterprise systems to the Google Enterprise platform and data hosting to third-party server, signals the beginning of corporate travel suppliers' exploration of the cloud computing concept. That strategy enables companies to house their data elsewhere and provides greater flexibility and frees up resources for technology development.

Moving to the cloud lets TRX shift resources to product development and other areas instead of system maintenance, said vice president of IT operations and enterprise application development Aaron Aycock. It also enables TRX to link to other applications in the Google Apps Marketplace.

"If we can shift that work and the time it takes for our administrators and support staff to maintain an exchange mail system and move that into Google's court—who is going to do a fantastic job with that—it allows us to focus on the things that do help our customers, like bringing innovative products to the market," Aycock said.

TRX also is testing its data hosting with the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud system. Aycock said the company is evaluating areas where cloud computing can make TRX more flexible and adaptable to market changes. One of the biggest efficiencies, he said, is that it "doesn't require the huge capital investment up front to get started to build capacity in our system. Once you get servers up and running, CPU hour versus CPU hour is about the same in terms of cost, but the fact that you get them up and running so quickly is huge for us."

Concur chairman and CEO Steve Singh said at the recent Strategic Travel Symposium, presented in New York by BTN and the National Business Travel Association, that the industry should expect to see "technology continue to creep up where it can to do it better, faster and cheaper with better service."

As cloud computing gains traction, travel and IT managers should be wary of data security, since their company's data will be housed in new environments. "It's something you have to take seriously," said Aycock. "We use hosted Salesforce.com and store some pretty sensitive information. Any company that is using Salesforce.com has crossed that bridge of a level of comfort for security of data in the cloud."

He added, "It's definitely something that we have to pay attention to and be careful with for the decisions that we make. No moves will be made at all into the cloud without first working with our security team on the ground here to make sure that it doesn't do anything to jeopardize our Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard or any other certifications we've achieved so far."