It would seem that nothing is sacred, nothing a person can do that a software program can’t do better, so why would business travel be exempt? Obviously, some software is better than others, and when it comes to travel expenses, Concur has the runs on the board. An American-headquartered technology company that provides cloud-based travel and expense management services, Concur has been owned by giant German multinational software corporate SAP since late 2014.
Concur announced its presence in Asia–Pacific twelve years ago, with a core team of three, one of whom was Murray Warner. Now Director, Business Development, Australia and New Zealand, Murray started his career in IT at a small start-up in Silicon Valley at age 23. Concur took over the start-up seventeen years ago, and Murray made the switch.
“Concur Technologies is led by Steve Singh, who is now on the executive board at SAP, who bought the company. It was a web-based HR system, and he bought a web-based procurement system as well. The idea was to build a web-based platform of business solutions,” explains Murray.
In 1999, the software world was dominated by client–server software.
“The reason I ended up in software initially was that I thought there would be some sort of transition—like most of the software the world is going through now—moving business systems into the cloud. Think back to 1999: there was a similar change happening, away from client–server software. We were at the forefront, and it felt like we were changing the world. Even if what we did sounded boring on paper, it was actually pretty cool.”
Murray started in marketing and moved into several technical roles on the client side. He was involved in implementation and project management roles across the US and Europe for three years. Twelve years ago, with two colleagues, he came to Australia.
“Think of any role at a software company, and I had it at that point. I was selling, implementing, supporting. At that time, Concur had only 200 employees worldwide, and I held one of only three positions in Asia–Pacific.
“We were transitioning from being a licensed software business to being a cloud business—one of the first in the world—and trying to figure out how to make it work, so I had a pretty extensive career, selling Concur and getting it up and running.”
