Comments on: At Rearden Commerce, Addiction is Job One ($100 Million Round Confirmed, Major Deal With JPMorgan Chase)

By: Rearden Commerce Goes Mobile

Rearden Commerce Goes Mobile — Tue, 20 May 2008 07:09:43 +0000

[...] the $100 million it just raised Rearden can afford go after the mobile market aggressively. Now, where is that iPhone [...]

By: Software as Services mobile edition

Software as Services mobile edition — Fri, 09 May 2008 22:16:09 +0000

[...] has built a broad customer base of more than 1,700 — mostly since it signed the Amex deal — and according to Techcrunch it has close to $1 billion worth of transactions going through its [...]

By: beentheredonethat

beentheredonethat — Thu, 08 May 2008 01:13:11 +0000

worked there. it is smoke & mirrors and kayak is vastly superior for consumers.

amex and chase have no choice but to let rearden custom build internal IT app or portals they can’t build themselves.

million users? million employees that “might” use it someday.

By: Techy

Techy — Wed, 07 May 2008 14:04:32 +0000

“If I could go to my intranet, review a ton of airlines, hotels, car rentals, have an overlay of my corporations expense policy (i.e., hotel not > 300 per night) and easily plug in corporate entertainment (dinner reso’s, yanks tix, concerts), and with the click of a button have it approved and submitted to my expense department that’s pretty freeking sweet.”

Joe, You just described a service called Concur Travel & Expense.

By: anon

anon — Wed, 07 May 2008 06:17:17 +0000

Hard to imagine this could be anything but a collection of worst-in-class components.

By: Andy Wong

Andy Wong — Wed, 07 May 2008 05:43:58 +0000

Nice user interfaces, great sales and support team, and herds of 3-party products, Rearden had played the portal game quite well.

So the VCs expected Google may acquire Rearden after acquiring GrandCentral.

GrandCentral is a portal of electronic communication, and Rearden is a portal of commercial services.

By: phenom

phenom — Tue, 06 May 2008 23:23:24 +0000

Next killer app ? hmm too hard to say for now.

http://vidsonly.blogspot.com/

By: Mighty Sam Faceball

Mighty Sam Faceball — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:50:53 +0000

No if they could only figure out a way to get rid of the TSA lines.

By: Sugar Mcdaddy

Sugar Mcdaddy — Tue, 06 May 2008 22:29:29 +0000

Lenny
Hey take it easy. Yeah I know about Chase and Bear Stearns and other savvy wall street types. Just warning folks on this blogbefore they get carried away. Put your money where your mouth is.

By: Lenny

Lenny — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:32:31 +0000

McDaddy - Nice handle! Chase and AMEX are among the world’s savviest investors. Do you realy believe they are fools or would invest in this thing unless they believed that it would help them change their business and/or deliver at least a 10x return?

Puleeeze!

By: Sugar Mcdaddy

Sugar Mcdaddy — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:19:16 +0000

Why does Rearden need more funding. If a company cannot be cash positive in 8 years when the hell will they. Wake up people, this is smoke and mirrors.
Why do they need funding after having acquired 92 customers (Did they really). Patrick has a history of giving hyper bole. Don’t drink that cool aid dude.
SM

By: Paul

Paul — Tue, 06 May 2008 21:04:28 +0000

Got to hand it to Grady for being tough.

But how do they handle being one more level removed from the actual service provider ? Increased error rates and decreased customer leverage are a significant problem with travel agents (Book through the airline and you have a prayer of fixing a busted itinerary. Book through Expedia, however, well… hope you like the DFW lounge a whole lot.).

By: Lenny

Lenny — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:19:59 +0000

Lots of posts on the topic of expense reporting. One of the cool things about Rearden Commerce’s platform is that it lets any web-based expense reporting tool consume a web service containing the transaction details for anything booked through the site - beyond just the usual travel services. Expense reports can then be pre-populated with the data so users don’t have to type it all in themselves.

This is much better than the approach others like Concur are taking - who only give customers the option of integrating their own crappy travel booking engine with their proprietary expense app.

Freedom of choice is a beautiful thing.

By: Toshi

Toshi — Tue, 06 May 2008 20:09:08 +0000

I would love this service if it can take care of the expense report as well.

By: Mario

Mario — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:49:04 +0000

@ Alaska, I loved kozmo’s. They brought a PS1 to my apartment and Rainbow Six.

By: Noah

Noah — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:24:12 +0000

We used the AMEX Axiom version of this site at my company (900+ employees worldwide). We recently dropped it. It is essentially a replacement for a travel agent with options for meals and entertainment.

Pro’s:
-Established flight options as in/out of policy (within 10% of the cost of the cheapest flight on a major carrier)
-Stored loyalty program information.
-Presented historical on-time data for flights

Cons:
-Just as expensive (or more expensive) than most other travel agents, changing a 5$ per trip per item (hotel, flight, rental car), 20$ int’l
-Wouldn’t return all the cheapest flights on major carriers at the best prices (Compared to Kayak)
-Wouldn’t return all flight options– it would often omit possible flights, especially internationally
-Clunky web interface
-Didn’t integrate into our iConcur expense report management system

The bottom line is that this service is a lazy way for HR departments to eliminate oversight on T&E expenses. Every company problem can be fixed by yelling or web software, right?

Reardon/Axiom did nothing to actually speed up the process of planning trips. There are many areas where they could improve this experience, but their all-in-one approach needs a few more updates IMHO.

By: Blake

Blake — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:19:48 +0000

Can you post large, viewable versions of those slides from the Rearden pitch?

By: plug buster

plug buster — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:15:45 +0000

TechCrunch - you are busted!

I think Michael genuinely likes this company, and probably gave Erick the green light to do the plug. I like the vision too but as a reputable blog in the valley do your homework.

What are their clients saying about them? Why are the hemorrhaging exec staff? What is their revenue for 2007? Ask around and you’ll get all the answers. A friend of mine worked there and was shocked when he saw their numbers. Said they were <10M for 2007.

Patrick Grady and Rearden’s PR probably wrote most of the post themselves.

$200M investment for a simple booking service with a lot of bells and whistles.

Great reporting Michael and Erik!

By: Ron G

Ron G — Tue, 06 May 2008 19:13:26 +0000

Looks interesting but how is this different from a Google Search? or any other website with a good search feature?

By: TechCrunch Japanese アーカイブ » Rearden Commerce CEO「中毒にするのが第1任務」～大型調達に続きJPMorgan Chaseと大型契約も

Tue, 06 May 2008 18:56:24 +0000

[...] [原文へ] [...]

By: PlumentMall?

PlumentMall? — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:47:17 +0000

Rearden, well Shrug me off?
Present hardships in IT, sure seem like a book…
This article, while cool if real, forgive me if so, joke today, what is real or not?
Some might also remember listed name as well…

By: PARTDANTAMEMA

PARTDANTAMEMA — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:39:34 +0000

cum
http://cum-new-site.net/

By: mark s

mark s — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:24:55 +0000

oh no - here we go again. i used to work for a company called CMGi. we had slides with nice logos and integrated merchants and banner clients and on and on.

what ever happened to circles? i could name literally 20 companies doing this in the 1.0 era.

By: plugssuck

plugssuck — Tue, 06 May 2008 18:19:12 +0000

@18 you nailed it! TC busted!!

By: Thomas

Thomas — Tue, 06 May 2008 17:50:05 +0000

People this isn’t that difficult to get. Reardon is disrupting the travel industry and the corporate expense management industry in one swipe by answering two pain points. First, corporate users spend way too much time organizing complex itineraries and organizing sporadic large purchases. Trust me, I watch my colleagues screw this up all the time. Second, even when employees are able to purchase their own goods, they do it very inefficiently leading to significant purchasing waste. I think the trend Reardon is riding here is the incompetance of the average corporate worker to procure efficiently. It actually makes sense when you look at the fact that many corporate service providers actually incent the worker to make bad purchase decisions. Want to sponsor my conference at a very high price? I’ll comp you a few days at a destination resort where we’re holding it so that you can ‘evaluate’ it. Want to buy some research? I’ll give your group extra free access licenses if you can get a bunch of other BUs to sign up. You get the picture.
Basically this is Ariba 2.0. Apply the consumer orientation of Web 2.0 applications (ease of use, user centric design, web app architecture) and apply it to a big meaty corporate problem (our employees are idiots when it comes to procurement).
Next!