Salesforce, Concur To Reveal Cloud Integration At Dreamforce
The integration, which will be unveiled at Dreamforce Thursday, marks the first time the two SaaS powerhouses have joined hands, the two companies said.
"It's connecting two worlds," said Ron Huddleston, Salesforce's vice president of global ISVs and channels.
According to Concur Senior Vice President of Business Development, SMB Group, Tim FitzGerald, Concur built its travel and expense solution on top of Salesforce's Force.com platform. Now, clients that use Salesforce can sign up for ConcurForce, which lets users log into their Salesforce accounts and get Concur functionality.
"They can use Concur within the same experience," FitzGerald said. Concur added that user Concur data is still hosted by Concur in its data centers.
The Salesforce-Concur integration comes as Salesforce looks to deepen its partner relationships and wrap more functionality into its core platforms.
Along with enabling Concur capabilities within Salesforce, the ConcurForce partnership offers new analytics capabilities as well, allowing users to run reports looking at travel and expenses associated with certain accounts and other customer data.
And continuing with the social enterprise focus of Dreamforce 2011, both Salesforce and Concur said Chatter is fully embedded into ConcurForce; as is Tripit itinerary and trip management functionality, which Concur acquired earlier this year.
The integration lets Salesforce users manage travel and expenses, book trips and track and manage itineraries through the Salesforce user interface.
Concur CEO and chairman Steve Singh said that the two SaaS juggernauts will offer a mobile version of ConcurForce in coming months, and the initial release will have some mobile functionality.
The two companies are also planning to arm their respective channels with the ability to offer ConcurForce. Huddleston said that current Salesforce partners can offer Concur as an add-on into their Salesforce deployment. Singh said Concur partners can also offer the integration.
Salesforce and Concur said they foresee partners integrating additional third-party functionality into ConcurForce in the future. The partnership targets a new partner type that Huddleston dubbed a "SaaGgregator," or SaaS aggregator that marries once disparate SaaS offerings.
"We both have very large distribution capabilities," Singh said. "Let's go sell both of these into customers and then get the channel to sell them."