Today there is a major announcement of SAP's intent to buy Concur, a leading SaaS travel and expense provider. I fully embrace and applaud this company's decision, a great move! Concur is the name I often hear from our Cloud for Travel and Expense (CfTE) colleagues, because it is the biggest and most threatening competitor for our own cloud offerings on travel and expense. And that's the major reason we are making an RDS solution to add competitive edge.
Exactly one month ago, I published two blogs on SAP Cloud for Travel and Expense rapid-deployment solution (CfTE RDS) on couple places, although the release date is still ahead (2014 Q4). For detailed description of the solution and scenarios, please see the following postings:
Onboarding SAP Cloud for Travel and Expense with Accelerated Integration
Expense Scenarios with SAP Cloud for Travel and Expense
Amazingly the blogs were well received, generated great traction and good feedback among broad audience, including CfTE executive management and marketing side, became a popular content, and were promoted by other people in a popular cloud JAM group, then became one of the top stories in The Pulse. It is also used by internal people as example for broadening the post reaching.
If you think that's the most important thing, by showing how popular the blog is, how many views it had generated, then you are wrong. There is much more beyond it what really makes the point. The CfTE RDS solution indeed makes a difference and significant impact on our competitive positioning and solution marketing even before it goes to market. One month ago, nobody expects Concur to have such desire to be bought, but couple weeks ago, I heard some rumor that Concur was looking for potential buyers and approached Oracle and SAP. Now it's going so quickly that make you hard to believe today SAP announced the acquisition news. How this had been done? Vision + Hard Work + Right Message!
The CfTE RDS provides solutions to boost marketing and product team's confidence to compete with most aggressive competitor, fill in the gap on implementation deficiency and lacking of best practices. It's not only a technical integration solution on hybrid cases, but also business solution with well-thought scenarios to support complicated business functions on diverse system landscape.
Beyond that, I think we may look forward with more confidence, as right solution can be applied on any technology, get the market then no doubt you get the customers. Have a good vision at right time, then put great effort to make it, plus right message to broadcast to the right audience, we will reach the goal. This is a success to RDS, and a success to SAP! Now what, we might think about the entire cloud solution based on our acquired families including Concur, and believe it or not, RDS will make significant impact.
