Originally Posted by
blobbles
Serkos products are reasonably disruptive, but not overly so. They have chained together a few interesting products (combination travel is a good one - hotel/flight/cars etc in one go), then back it up with a simple expense management solution. More than anything their product makes it a whole lot easier to do travel and expense management. They are reasonably responsive to function requests and appear to have a pretty good engineering team behind the product.
How do I know? The organisation I work for has implemented both their travel software and expense management products. Reports from users are very good and it is cutting down on our costs and annoyance. They seem to produce "oh, is it that easy" products that require very little hands on massaging to get it right. Plus according to our finance people its a pretty good cost saver. They have integrated workflows too to make approvals easy.
Those are the sort of products you want to have, that require barely any manpower to manage and are easy for users. Fairly seamless from a user perspective is what you really want and Serko delivers that 80-90%. Based on this experience, which is often painful for a lot of organisations, I would recommend their products. In most organisations this stuff is a PITA, so to find something that "just works", is a god send and makes an entire organisation more productive (better for front end users, better for back office finance & IT, resulting in cost savings all around). Actually after seeing it in action it makes you think "why wasn't it always like this?".
Reproducible? Yes. And some huge corporates have probably created their own in-house Serko products, or at least bits of it. But not without some effort. Their products would be useful for any corporate that finds this stuff hard, which is a LOT of corporates. But its not sexy. Its not going to win middle management huge prizes as a result of massive cost savings. But still, the appeal is definitely there and cost savings post implementation will flow after a year or two of operation. As they sign more and more customers their recommendations engines and potential for further big data analysis will ramp up quickly giving them heaps of future potential growth options.
They are a fresh company with active developers (which you can actually talk to!) and what looks like solid architecture. We have had one bug with them, which was fixed within 3 days of finding it. That is sensational response time for a company (Microsoft bugs we have had can take > 6 months to resolve!).
I am generally a tech FA investor (who works on the leading edge in IT) and own Serko shares as a result of seeing their products in action. Having worked for a stack of corporates, I have seen how painful this stuff is, so seeing it done well is fantastic. The oppourtunities in front of them are huge, they only need to sign up a few big corporates and revenue will take off. But my feeling is it will be a slow burn. Their cost control is great, but I wouldn't mind seeing them go large on growth. I believe they have a US sales team which will be actively pumping the benefits over there, which transition to pretty much anywhere in the world.
I can imagine them being bought by a company like Microsoft or Intuit and their products being integrated into their finance systems (or creating a slight offshoot/extension). Or a takeover from another travel company. Going it alone is biggest bang for their buck, but it will probably take some time.