I had become bored with eProcurement. The technology was more than 15 years old and the whole category, along with related categories, were well along in their “hype cycle” according to Gartner (my emphasis added).
Ariba, had been purchased by SAP, Oracle continued to ignore the eProcurement market, SciQuest stagnated, and the only new news seemed to be the unicorn, Coupa–whose newer technology and more supplier-friendly approach brought some needed innovation and differentiation to the eProcurement world.
But now:
- Tradeshift has announced its long-awaited e-procurement entry.
- Selectica has cobbled together some piece parts for a source to settle solution and has partnered with Tradeshift for a sourcing application
- Coupa and IBM are throwing the Watson FUD out there
- Deem should be coming with something in the eProcurement space
- VC and PE firms are interested in eProcurement again.
Of all these changes, the most important would seem to be Tradeshift Buy, Tradeshift’s e-procurement offering announced today. Tradeshift’s e-procurement solution has cross-catalog search, a nifty browser plug-in and integrates single use cards into the e-procurement process. Nice features to be sure, but in this market, just because you build it, does not mean they will come. It’s going to be a real dogfight out there, which makes it exciting again.
I was at the launch yesterday in Procurecon. Agree it is exciting that we have a new entrant in this space but it looks like a copy of the coupa functionality for supporting low value indirect purchasing, both of which are similar but a little less sophisticated copies of ariba’s spot buy functionality. Side note: The twitter feed coming from the tradeshift CEO yesterday showed appalling levels of integrity.
Thanks for your comment. I really appreciate having the comparison to Coupa and Ariba spot buy at a more granular level than I can provide. I looked at the CEO of Tradeshift’s tweets too!. New heights of chutzpah!
Hey “Supply Chain Sam” glad you saw our launch, you will soon see the innovation runs way deeper than a copy of Coupa (didn’t Coupa just copy Ariba with a little nicer UI btw?). We are finally bringing these things to the market:
– Killing the catalog for the enterprise buyer and having a centralized product data-base for the whole network – search and business terms define the marketplace you look at – not an arbitrary binary file of information
– Buy Anywhere is true innovation in the sense that we reverse the problem of rogue spend, rather than trying to control everyone’s behavior we give them the right tools (nobody have this today)
Finally I think you are missing a bigger point, we never once during the launch said that Tradeshift Buy was for direct, indirect or services as you claim – in fact you can use it for all and it’s expandable with apps from partners like Upwork (contingent labor), Quyntess (direct spend), Amazon (indirect spend). This is a massive innovation and I think follow how the market will be converging in the future and I guess also why Ariba bought Fieldglass (but it will take then 5 years to integrate).
As for my twitter feed, sure we bite – we are very very competitive and we will call out bullsh*t when we see it. Luckily I don’t take feedback on my twitter behaviour from anonymous posters on blogs (which always seems to increase in frequency when we are hurting the opposition) – so see you out there and good fight!