Endeca: Quietly Launching Into the Spend Management World
I usually don't embarrass people like this, but a couple weeks back, I got a call from two product management / product marketing types at Endeca who wanted to pick my brain for 30 minutes on the spend analytics and broader procurement/supply chain business and technology areas. Since they aren't clients, I have no problem conveying a few points of the conversation -- especially in light of their quality questions. If I were an incumbent spend visibility guy/gal, I'd be scared. Perhaps very scarred for what the future might bring in the form of a new competitor. For in talking to these two gentlemen, it became clear that should Endeca get the internal support to really put some engineering muscle into their Spend Analysis Module and associated future products, they will quickly transition the spend visibility world to a whole new playing field. What's the power of Endeca -- and more generally the concept of Guided Navigation as they call it? Simple. The ability to rapidly identify, locate and present information in entirely new ways so that information and insight literally pop off the screen -- instead of waiting for your cadre of sourcing analysts to sort through their OLAP environment and figure out what to do next. Very cool, I say.
- Jason Busch
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With true ad hoc reporting looking more and more like parametric search coupled with charting capabilities, the world of Search and traditional Business Intelligence seem to be merging. BI vendors are adding search features and search vendors are pushing the envelope for reporting & analytics. This will be interesting. Historically, Spend Analysis always included reporting & analytics components but advanced search and data mining capabilities can make spend analysis much more powerful and actionable. It will be worth watching not only Endeca but also the likes of Autonomy, Fast Search & Transfer (now owned by Microsoft), and even Google.
Moreover, search vendors have developed various algorithmic approaches such as K nearest neighbor for pattern recognition classifier, Bayesian for probabilistic learning classifier, different weights for different words for Vector Space classifier. Those intellectual properties and techniques can be effectively applied towards spend classification, supplier de-duplication, etc. Those elements of spend processing are essential pre-requisite for proper Spend Analysis. Thus, I would expect that search vendors will play an increasingly important role in spend analysis. Comments?
Regards,
Aloke
http://endeca.com/manufacturing/spend-analysis.htm...