Routing All Travel Through the Cloud

Grazed from New York Times. Author: Quentin Hardy.

Cloud computing and mobile technologies change more things than you think. Besides connecting people and devices, or making software operate together more efficiently, they give companies new ways to seek dominance. On Thursday, Concur, which sells expense-accounting software for business, said it had entered a partnership with United Airlines to enable direct travel bookings on United’s website. Book a flight for work, and it will automatically be entered on your expense form.

Any corporate travel site that connects to United’s system also will offer whatever preferred rates the company has negotiated, and not United’s published fares. It is the kind of thing Concur and other cloud-based expense systems, like Oracle’s PeopleSoft product, already do when an employee makes a purchase on a corporate credit card…

“Over time, the idea of an expense report should disappear,” said Steve Singh, Concur’s chief executive. “If my plane lands, why not automatically start booking me into my hotel, re-book my flight if one is cancelled, tie my trip to Uber?” All of that, in his mind, with Concur coordinating the experience and monitoring the spending on behalf of the client company…

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