E-Sourcing Forum's Predictions for 2007
If you've not already checked out
David Bush's predictions for 2007 over on E-Sourcing Forum, I'd suggest giving them a cursory glance. A number are concepts and themes that I've talked about on these virtual pages for quite sometime, while others are not. From a technology / vendor perspective, one which I would agree with is David's concept of the "triple crown of supply management" which he describes as Spend Analysis, Strategic Sourcing, Contract Management. David predicts that "aside from some obvious projected acquisitions, there should be more stand alone solutions banding together to compete against broad suites. These will come in the form of announced (and unannounced) alliances and cross-selling." Fascinating stuff, David. I await these deals, especially considering that most of the sourcing-driven suite vendors have quite average contract management capabilities relative to some of the best of breed offerings, at least in my book.
- Jason Busch
Tweet
TweetBacks
From our perspective, companies are buying the service not the tools. Many of our clients are too lean to absorb another tool set. They are still struggling with their SAP / Oracle / Peoplesoft implementations.
We agree with your assessment that most companies that do purchase tools, only use a small subset of the software that they do buy. Purchasing departments find it difficult to cost justify the expenditure and to obtain the budget and resources needed to effectively implement the solutions.
Consequently, we formulated our strategy of providing the spend analysis and sourcing services coupled with free tools - www.WhyAbe.com (RFX and Reverse Auction) that provide 90%+ of the feature / function that our clients are looking for. At the end of our engagements, our clients are e-enabled and trained in a tool that they can easily absob at no cost.