Steve Singh, left, of Concur celebrates the deal with SAP CEO
Steve Singh, left, of Concur celebrates the deal with SAP CEO

In a 30-minute conference call with analysts and press Thursday afternoon, SAP CEO Bill McDermott and Concur CEO Steve Singh sounded as if they were ready to take over the technology world as we know it.

“I think we really got something big here guys, really big,” said McDermott in his closing remarks after announcing the $8.3 billion acquisition of Concur.

Why’s McDermott — a bold-talking entrepreneur who got his start running a small delicatessen on Long Island — so bullish?

Well, just listen to how he described the Concur CEO and the business.

“When I met with Steve and his fantastic management team — by the way original founders of the company that can demo this to you on an iPhone —it is pretty impressive when you think about his business network. So, suppliers like Hertz and Delta, and travel management companies like Amex and others, distributors like Amadeus and Sabre, employers like Google and some of the others I mentioned. He really has this whole network in the palm of his hand.

“With TripLink, he expands that to Expedia and Orbitz and all of the online franchises that are involved in this massive industry, and Concur is the cornerstone of the entire industry. It is the best, marquee asset in the industry.

You think about Howard Schultz, my good friend, the founder of Starbucks, having a link directly to Concur on people’s mobile devices, so they don’t even have to deal with a checkout process, they just put the device and checkout…. and have that automatically show up in the expense system … within 60 seconds. You take Uber, one of the great companies of all time with a market cap pre-IPO that is nearly $20 billion, partnering with Steve and getting an amazing market opportunity for Concur. And the list goes on. And, I think to myself, that network effect, and you take the global reach of domain of SAP, and you add our ecosystem on top of it, and I think we have something big here guys, really big.”

Previously on GeekWire: SAP buying Concur Technologies for $8.3 billion

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