Concur Developing Mobile Solutions, Adds Support For Palm

The ASP has added support for Palm OS-based devices to its Expense solution, giving customers the ability to input expense data from the road and import that data for automated approval once back in the office. Palm support is but one of several mobile solutions being developed at Concur, said Elena Donio, vice president of worldwide marketing at the company, based here. Support for other handheld devices, as well as voice-interaction systems will be introduced in the near future, she said.

The voice-recognition capability is expected to be developed and available within the next three to six months, Concur is in negotiations with speech-recognition providers, Donio said. "With a limited vocabulary, you can get a lot done," she said. The idea is for road warriors to be able to connect to Concur's travel and expense system and speak expenses such as "taxi cab, $30," for example.

Also in the works is an imaging system that links scanned images such as restaurant or transportation receipts to an expense report. The Concur Expense system acknowledges the receipt, and back-office personnel can access the receipt images from within the solution.

Concur's hosted travel and expense solution, which is also available as a license, is being offered by several solution providers, including Jamcracker, KPMG and Answerthink.

"They are, without a doubt, the industry leader, with an installed based that is two to three times that of anyone else, and they have true experience," said Foster Schoch, a manager of workforce applications at Answerthink who manages the Concur alliance.

Concur has more than 950 clients, 600 of which are ASP customers and 100 of which are Fortune 500 companies.

Concur's customer base ranges from midsize companies such as Ocean Spray and Sabre to large enterprise such as SBC Communications, which has 220,000 employees using Concur's system. On average, 8,000 to 10,000 SBC employees log on to Concur Expense every day, Donio said.

Concur's offerings reduce "at least by half" the time spent creating expense reports vs. manual expense reporting or creating reports using a spreadsheet, the company said.

Schoch said he welcomes Concur's mobile initiatives. "We are very interested in [mobile," he said. "That's certainly a direction for the industry. It's simply a necessity."

Travel and expense is also a necessity, Schoch said, noting that it is the second-largest controllable expense in most companies. "Travel and expense has a huge impact on potential, quick [return on investment and huge dollar savings, " he said.