Empower Dispatch: Procuri Acquires TrueSource
At the start of the Empower this morning, Procuri announced that they had acquired TrueSource, a spend analytics vendor. A poorly kept secret -- David Bush or E-Sourcing Forum fame speculated earlier this spring that the deal would happen -- the acquisition makes a tremendous amount of sense for Procuri and its customers alike. TrueSource is a vendor that not many folks know well in the space, but one that has been around for nearly a decade and has developed a strong list of reference accounts.
The acquisition fills a significant gap in the Procuri arsenal from an analytics and visibility perspective. Like Emptoris, Ariba, Zycus, and others, TrueSource has strong cleansing, classification, and data enrichment capabilities. But one TrueSource customer in the manufacturing sector that I spoke with at the event -- who used to work for a Procuri competitor and knows the analytics market well -- said TrueSource beat the competition in their selection process from both a functionality and pricing perspective hands down.
Perhaps most important of all, the deal signals a rapid trend towards consolidation in the sourcing and supply management market. Despite what many vendors might have you believe, the overall sector is one where innovation is taking a back-seat to the evolution of end-to-end product suites at reasonable price points. I believe that this deal will put pressure on the Emptoris' of the world from a pricing perspective for end-to-end capabilities. And it will force the last remaining best of breed spend analytics and visibility vendors (e.g, Zycus and SAS) to further justify their existence in a world where it is possible to make a strong business case for integrated suite capabilities. Last, the deal also marks one less acquisition prospect for SAP or Oracle, who still lack solid visibility and analytics capabilities in the Spend Management arena.
- Jason Busch
The acquisition fills a significant gap in the Procuri arsenal from an analytics and visibility perspective. Like Emptoris, Ariba, Zycus, and others, TrueSource has strong cleansing, classification, and data enrichment capabilities. But one TrueSource customer in the manufacturing sector that I spoke with at the event -- who used to work for a Procuri competitor and knows the analytics market well -- said TrueSource beat the competition in their selection process from both a functionality and pricing perspective hands down.
Perhaps most important of all, the deal signals a rapid trend towards consolidation in the sourcing and supply management market. Despite what many vendors might have you believe, the overall sector is one where innovation is taking a back-seat to the evolution of end-to-end product suites at reasonable price points. I believe that this deal will put pressure on the Emptoris' of the world from a pricing perspective for end-to-end capabilities. And it will force the last remaining best of breed spend analytics and visibility vendors (e.g, Zycus and SAS) to further justify their existence in a world where it is possible to make a strong business case for integrated suite capabilities. Last, the deal also marks one less acquisition prospect for SAP or Oracle, who still lack solid visibility and analytics capabilities in the Spend Management arena.
- Jason Busch
There is enormous room for improvement in all the tools suites. For example, in spend analysis, don't believe pundits who think that all you need to do is to throw some cleansed transactions into a data warehouse. Cleansing is easy; it's the analysis that's hard, and that's where most of the current products fall flat on their faces.
Even RFx, which according to all the analysts was supposed to be "done" years ago, isn't. One of our consulting partners tried to use a leading RFx product within the last 12 months, and failed utterly to accomplish their mission, almost losing their client in the process. Sure, these products have been around for a while, but are they improving, or are vendors simply milking old code for high revenue?
And, is a sourcing "suite" really a suite? To what extent do all these magic modules integrate -- really? Or are they just different and unrelated freight cars all attached to the same locomotive? There's a big difference between the marketing hype and the reality.
The bottom line is, there's plenty of room for innovation. And boy, do we need it!