BIQ Respond to Emptoris' Lawsuit
BIQ has provided a formal response to the Emptoris lawsuit. You can find it on BIQ's site. While the response is succinct -- and I would encourage everyone to read it -- I've quoted a few of the highlights below:
"BIQ unequivocally denies the allegations made by Emptoris in its press release of December 5, 2006, and we are confident that we will prevail in the courts .... BIQ intends to countersue aggressively, at the appropriate time, for abuse of process, malicious prosecution, and defamation ... We will continue to run our business as we have been, and we'll continue to introduce new and innovative spend analysis technology."
Spend Matters strongly encourages all potential customers of Emptoris and BIQ -- not to mention other spend visibility vendors -- to evaluate the respective products and companies on their own merits and to not let litigation get in the way of the right business decision. In my book, both vendors offer innovative but different solutions to spend visibility and analytics. While I cannot speak to the underlying code, I would say that BIQ and Emptoris have divergent philosophical approaches to helping companies identify savings opportunities through spend visibility initiatives.
- Jason Busch
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I similarly questioned the moves of the small e-procurement company mentioned by the SpendFool yesterday for taking suit against your flagship sponsor (and now against the ERP giant from Walldorf) for basic e-procurement and catalog ordering capabilities.
While I neither know (nor care) about the merits of this recent case. I do believe a company has a right to protect its IP and assets. But I have grave concerns about attepmts to squelch innovation through litigation. I have particular concerns about patents that have been awarded for replicating common processes -- such as placing an order -- in an electronic form. I mean, should the U.S. postal service (or the Pony Express) be able to lay claim to royalties for all the e-mails that have ever been sent? (Okay, an exaggeration, but not by much.)
While delivering near-term competitive advantage, such lawsuits will only wind up damaging the entire spend/supply management sector -- introducing new risks, stalling solution investments, and adding costs and delays to product development as vendors spend less time creating innovative new features and more time questioning, "Will this hold up in court."
Financially this puts a huge strain on BIQ