It is no secret that the public financial markets in general, and the technology sector specifically have been heavily battered at least over the last 2 years (in fact, NASDAQ hit an all-time high of 5133, exactly 3 years ago). Valuations are low and Wall Street forecasts vary significantly as to when the market is expected to recover. But, according to the Dow Jones Software Index, Redmond, WA-based Concur Technologies (NASDAQ: CNQR) has been among the top ten performers with a 200+ percent gain since 2000. In a phone interview, Chairman, CEO & President Sudhir 'Steve' Singh said, "This may be attributed to our highly focused approach. We believe in building our business for the long term and our fundamentals have always been strong all along, and specially during the boom period." Arguably, this was a period when revenues and profits took a back seat to exclusively building and increasing market share.

Concur was founded in 1993. Steve was an investor in the company from the very beginning, and has played an active management role since 1996. Concur is a provider of Web-based corporate expense management software and services, with a singular focus on reducing costly and inefficient expense processes in businesses of all sizes. Steve's frustrating, expensive and time-consuming personal experiences with the reporting and managing of corporate travel-related expenses led to the eventual formation of Concur. Concur has more than 1,100 firms as clients, including seven of the ten largest Global 100 companies.

Concur's solutions are provided through a variety of flexible delivery models - license, hosted license, hosted subscription and application service provider (ASP). "Our outsourced model is most prevalent, the reasons being it requires minimal IT support and modest capital requirements. But as a matter of fact, all of our solutions are designed to accommodate a wide range of customer business needs." Research firm Aberdeen Group (Boston, MA) has estimated that a Web-based, automated expense-management system offers the following average savings: cost to process a report reduced by 90% to $5, time to enter an expense report reduced by 67% to 15 minutes and time to settle an expense claim reduced by a factor of 10.

Oracle and SAP have provided expense management solutions as a way to drive incremental consulting revenue for many years, typically providing licenses at no cost and charging for deployment and services. To which Steve replied, "These so-called competitors have indeed provided solutions for some time now, but their target market is exclusively the Global 4000 customers, who have multiple ERP systems and therefore are unable to derive any significant ROI from these suppliers. Our customers, on the other hand, prefer the outsourced model."

Last July, when Concur acquired its main competitor, Captura Software, Puget Sound Business Journal carried headlines such as "a real steal" and "a fantastic bargain." When asked to comment during my interview, Steve continued, "Then, and now, we're undoubtedly the leader in this market. In the end though, it was clear that Concur's management philosophy and executive team were going to prevail. We're delighted that the integration phase has gone better than expected. We had high hopes and it seems clear that this has panned out well."

Concur does not currently outsource any IT tasks. Added Steve, "But I do think there is an opportunity to outsource many of the software solutions we use to run our business." Steve also believes that businesses must do what is right for their business, including opting for offshore and IT outsourcing. "They need to focus on delivering market leading solutions at competitive prices."

Regarding Concur's long-term strategy, Steve replied, "Over time, Concur will likely predominantly resemble a business services model company. Long-term, Concur could bear a resemblance to ADP's business model (the payroll processing giant), of course in a different market segment."