San Francisco –
Acknowledging Concur's first-quarter service disruptions, Elena Donio, who
became Concur's president in December after 17 years with the company, made the
case for the software's long-term stability and impending offerings while
speaking here at last week's Concur Fusion annual conference.
Concur 18 months ago hired as chief technology officer Mark
Nelson, formerly with Oracle, to oversee innovation and improvements to the
company's technology stack. "We started on that journey to look at how to
create the architecture and stability for the future, but that path is not
always a straight line," Donio said. "There have been a couple of
times this year where we've had some issues in performance and reliability, but
our investment and commitment to that for you has never been higher."
Concur execs speaking at the conference indicated that automated processes will dominate Concur's next generation. In
the near future, syncing with Outlook Calendar will enable Concur to associate
expenses with meeting dates automatically. This follows KDS's January 2014
replacement of a spreadsheet interface with a calendar view of expenses.
Concur users also will be able to opt in for Concur to pull
expenses, match receipts and create their expense reports automatically as
charges come in. As part of this feature, Concur will at the end of each week send
users email summaries to approve before submitting. Similarly, the system could
create invoices automatically for review on mobile devices.
Concur's ExpenseIt tool, in which optical character
recognition transcribes receipts and populates expense forms, also is headed
for the Concur mobile app. And Concur users also will be able to connect personal
credit cards to Concur accounts so users can swipe items to include in expense
reports.
Concur vice president of travel products Doug Anderson,
meanwhile, introduced a beyond-expense, aspirational project. Called Esper, the
service would crowdsource data from mobile devices, low-energy Bluetooth
technology beacons and machine learning to determine the shortest airport security
line.