Brief: SAP To Acquire Concur For $8.3 Billion

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.