Travel service provider Concur builds datacentres in Europe to support growth

Concur Technologies, the integrated travel and expenses service provider, has built colocation datacentres in Europe to cater to its European customers more quickly. The company has worked with datacentre provider Equinix and telephony firm AT&T to build the facility with sites provisioned in France and the Netherlands.

The fully-virtualised European datacentre facilities will offer a combination of public and private cloud hosting to its enterprise customers in EMEA giving them an option to host their data locally.

The investment will also help Concur form a travel and expenses (T&E) cloud, the company said.

“Concur appreciates just how important it is for companies to ensure their data is stored securely,” said Isabel Montesdeoca, general manager for Concur, EMEA.

The new European datacentre is designed to meet the needs of its European customers and offer them peace of mind with regards to reliable, and local, data storage and access, Montesdeoca said. 

In a typical month, Concur processes 1.4TB (terabyte) of receipt images and 6.2 million expenses reports and travel transactions.

The company’s IT services are based on Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) infrastructure from over 30 cloud suppliers. This breadth helps it take advantage of the Application Programming Interface (API) of a VAT services provider to deliver subject matter expertise on compliance. 

“As an enabler of SaaS solutions, we know how important it is to build cloud infrastructure that is both globalised and localised,” said Steve Caniano, vice-president, hosting, managed applications and cloud solutions at AT&T. 

“We worked closely with Concur to host their applications as close to their user-base as possible.”

Concur has employed 16 permanent IT professionals from the UK, France and Czech Republic to oversee the data management at the facilities on an on-going basis.