Raj Singh
Concur claims its Mobile application is nearing 1 million users. "Today we have hundreds of thousands of mobile users," said president and COO Rajeev Singh in a recent interview. The number of corporate accounts using the app is "in the several thousands," Singh said. "There will always be those who want more time to study the issue before pressing forward, and those people will have their opportunity to do so. The reality of the situation is, while we like to spend more time talking about those who don't want to move forward, the vast majority--90 percent-plus--of the customers who have access to mobile have enabled it. People are downloading the application, and they're using it more every month." Among other comments excerpted below, Singh said users would see in-policy bookings "in the not-too-distant future." More than half of Concur Mobile users are on BlackBerry, with "a growing percentage of customers coming up on the iPhone and Android devices," Singh said. Concur in August announced a new reseller programand third-party app integrationfor its Mobile solution.
So there are apps and there are platforms. We've heard a lot about platforms lately. But what does it mean when the providers in the industry are all trying to compete on platforms ... don't you ultimately end up with every app on every platform and everyone is the same?
There's a missing part of that debate that is very interesting. Let's go back to Windows. It's clearly a platform. The No.1 reason developers wrote for Windows was the proliferation of Windows applications. They write for platforms where there are people who will use their applications. Everyone can have a platform and be a platform provider. We're saying our platform is to allow third-party developers to interface with this technology and provide their services within the construct of control for the corporation and convenience for the employee. We have 10,000 customers and 7 million employees accessing and working with that platform every day. There's an audience developers can reach. Everyone is out there talking about a platform, but sometimes you can have a party and nobody comes.
One dynamic we seem to be witnessing is that there is a goal for corporate control and traveler convenience to coexist, but within corporations those things sometimes conflict. What are you doing to try and get the corporate customers--whether it's the travel manager, their IT people or someone else in the organization--on board with mobile devices?
I would debate that point. The reason travel managers in the past have been reluctant is that everyone has been saying, "It's about choice and convenience," but [travel managers] are saying, "What about the control angle?" We think you can answer both questions and when you do, and you have a more constructive dialogue with travel managers, accounts payable managers or any managers inside businesses who control the travel and expense process, you will see better adoption. We're seeing that. Our adoption rate accelerates weekly, we're in the hundreds of thousands and there's a date in the real future here where we'll cross the million mark in terms of deployed users. When you think about that, I would say there is a significant majority of travel managers who already understand this is real and are enabling the adoption, but there are certainly some who aren't. We are helping to educate people about the platform story, and we're allocating people inside our business to have people work with travel managers in our customer base to help them build a mobile deployment strategy that works for their business.
Is it the travel managers and AP people per se, or is it the technology infrastructure and security concerns that have been a hurdle?
Let's put three devices together, the Android devices, iPhone and BlackBerry. If you took those three and looked at the penetration in corporate America, I would wager it is about 50 percent. If that's true, then IT shops are long past debating, "Am I going to have to deal with this?" and they are now saying, "Now that I know I have to deal with this, how do I deliver control and make sure I have a relationship with the application developer who is residing on my employee's devices?"
What are the most popular functions travelers are using?
This is what drives usage. This will be for many mobile applications the kiss of death--people will rush applications out there, call them a platform and then watch them get deleted because they are not providing enough useful capabilities that users can't find somewhere else. With us, one, they are viewing and managing itineraries. It's the most common usage of the application; viewing itineraries and then changing their travel plans associated with that itinerary. The second thing we see a lot of is approval of expense reports and travel requests. You're at the airport and you have five minutes before your flight, you pop it up on your device and you can look at every line item of expense reports, look at receipts and approve the expense report right there. And we're seeing increasing usage on booking taxis and restaurant reservations. The more applications that come in and join the platform, the more we're going to see different types of usage. All these things could otherwise be happening outside of the corporate mandated tool, but this will still allow that data to flow through to the back office and create reporting.
Existing users of Cliqbook or Concur Expense can download and use the app for no additional fee, but how do you monetize Concur Mobile when travel management company resellers offer it to users who don't already use those products?
There's no fee for that one either, and there's multiple things happening as it relates to the experience. One, there's an opportunity to advertise to that user with small banner ads and things that show up in those types of applications. Two, there are transactions that will be delivered across the board in terms of either interacting with third-party applications or booking taxis, restaurants, etc.--those all have an opportunity in both the short and long term to be monetized. Monetization of the mobile platform is by no means an exact science today, but if you add value and become persistent in the traveler's life--meaning it's something the traveler comes back to over and over--there will be ample places to monetize the experience. [For the TMC resellers], I would call them less license fees and more technology and setup fees. We think that charging for mobile apps is a surefire way to drive your usage down. When I search applications, the filter I put at the top is "Free."