Concur executive vice president for technology Tom DePasquale is a bomb thrower, which of course makes him a favorite of we media types. What now? Well, I asked Tom late last month about complaints over the past couple years from online booking providers regarding
Concur's proprietary approach to integrating online booking tools with its Concur Expense product. This was just before
GetThere announced integration with IBM. Here's what he had to say:
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Tom DePasquale
"The reality is that people need to quit moaning and do some work. We did an awful lot of work to make this integration occur. We integrate the agency procurement process with the expense reporting system. A component of that is the online booking tool. People need to quit worrying about whether we're open or closed and if someone wants to go do all the work we do, which is ten times what the online booking tool does, then we can have that discussion. In the past, when we have sat down with other booking tools to have this discussion, they wanted to do the easy work, not the hard work. The problem is, we're dealing with hard dollars; people expect Concur Expense to pay the actual amounts, not amounts that might have existed or been thought about at one time. They stayed two days not three. They didn't pick up the rent-a-car, etc."