Trends Report

Brief: SAP To Acquire Concur For $8.3 Billion

With Its Largest SaaS Acquisition To Date, SAP Looks To Dominate Corporate Travel And Expense

September 23rd, 2014
Paul D. Hamerman, null
Paul D. Hamerman
Andrew Bartels, null
Andrew Bartels
With contributors:
Christopher Andrews , Duncan Jones , Victoria Boutan

Summary

SAP made a bold move on September 18, 2014 to acquire travel and expense (T&E) market leader Concur for $8.3 billion, its largest software-as-a-service (SaaS) acquisition to date. This deal substantially boosts SAP's SaaS business, which depends almost entirely on acquired products rather than internally-developed SaaS solutions. Concur's extensive travel commerce network complements SAP's other buy-side business network assets, Ariba and Fieldglass, and extends its SaaS portfolio to the finance domain. The deal solidifies the market valuations of other pure-play SaaS vendors, and increases the appetite for other major tech vendors to move on them. SAP's application development and delivery (AD&D) customers should look to SAP's expanding SaaS portfolio as complementary to its flagship enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform in a hybrid scenario; but SAP is still lacking for broader on-premises to public cloud migration strategies.

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