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Concur announced a new Concur travel and expense management offering, Concurforce, built on Force.com, salesforce.com’s social enterprise platform for employee facing apps. With Concurforce, customers will have choice and simplicity when accessing the travel and expense management tool within Salesforce. Concurforce is specifically tuned to the needs of the heaviest business travellers and most frequent expense report filers – those employees in the field sales and client service functions. Since these employees are also the real drivers of revenue and client satisfaction in today’s social enterprises, helping them become more productive – while also enabling their companies to measure the true cost of client acquisition and client service – represents a new opportunity for salesforce.com customers.
Concurforce is built on the Force.com platform and leverages Concur’s market-leading travel and expense management services. The application delivers a simple and familiar experience for Salesforce users, saving them time and improving productivity. Concurforce allows users to:
– Collaborate on business trip details in Salesforce Chatter, the employee social network;
– Use itineraries from TripIt, a leading mobile trip organiser, to create and submit accurate, in-policy expense reports from within Salesforce CRM;
– Review and approve expense reports right from their Android, BlackBerry, iPhone, and iPad devices or from the Web; and
– Gain real-time visibility into T&E spend and instant insight into costs associated with sales opportunities and service engagements, helping them improve margins and manage the cost of sales.
“Companies can use the social technologies to drive more value for their businesses,” said Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO, salesforce.com. “With Concurforce, companies will be able to realise tremendous success with social and mobile travel and expense management.”
“Improving sales productivity is a key element in achieving revenue growth with an eye toward managing and controlling costs,” said Steve Singh, chairman and CEO, Concur. “T&E is an area of spend that for many companies is the second largest area of controllable spend after payroll. So it makes sense that we’d harness our expertise in travel and expense management to help road warriors become more productive, with a fast, easy and open app built on the Force.com platform, that’s simple for any organisation to set up and use in a matter of days.”
Additional notable features of Concurforce include:
– TripIt Pro integration – Gives users the freedom and flexibility to turn reservations from any travel vendor into a single organised itinerary that can automatically be turned into an expense report. Concurforce matches itinerary details from TripIt Pro with auto-imported credit card charges to create a “one click” expense report.
– Salesforce Chatter integration –TripIt Pro itineraries and Concurforce notifications are automatically posted to Chatter, increasing collaboration on business trips, agendas and content to save time and help employees work more efficiently with colleagues.
The Concurforce solution is expected to be generally available in the fourth calendar quarter of 2011. All of Concur’s latest innovations can be seen throughout Dreamforce 2011 by visiting Concur’s booth #415. Dreamforce 2011 is the cloud computing event of the year and the largest enterprise software conference in the industry. The ninth annual conference now has more than 45,000 people registered to attend. With nearly 500 sessions and 300 cloud companies in the expo, Dreamforce offers the content and educational opportunities that enable attendees to tap into the power of the social enterprise.
Theodore is the Co-Founder and Managing Editor of TravelDailyNews Media Network; his responsibilities include business development and planning for TravelDailyNews long-term opportunities.
