SAP boosts its cloud portfolio with the acquisition of Concur

SAP is buying business-travel and expense software vendor Concur for about $8.3 billion, in a bid to continue growing out its portfolio of cloud-based applications. The move comes a couple of weeks after Bloomberg reported that Concur had been shopping itself to potential buyers, including SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. Oracle decided not to make a deal and Microsoft wasn’t interested at all, according to the Bloomberg report.

In a move that leaves us in no doubt that the legacy monolithic vendors are focused on maintaining their market position, SAP today announced that it is acquiring Concur, a vendor that delivers cloud-based expense and travel management solutions. The deal, priced at $129 per share, is priced at a 20% margin on the latest closing price. That makes for a deal north of $8 billion. Concur has been looking for potential exists over the last month according to some reports and had approached both Oracle and SAP. Concur was founded back in 1993, and successfully shifted to a SaaS model – it currently has some 23,000 customers worldwide and a workforce of some 4,200. Revenue is around $700 million. The underlying trend here is one of cloud consolidation, depending on how you measure revenue, a combined SAP/Concur will be the second largest cloud vendor by revenue.