In my first column on Ivalua, I provided a basic company overview and a high-level look at its various solution components; in today's post, I'll take a closer look at Ivalua and its various modules and products.

What stood out most about Ivalua when I first began pulling back the covers was that it doesn't behave like an upstart vendor. For example, despite a total 2009 revenue that was less than some of the largest suite deals in the market (involving historic Ariba, SAP, and Oracle licensing arrangements), Ivalua has struck up a range of partnerships with both SI/consultancies and supply-management content providers worthy of its largest peers. In fact, Ivalua's partnerships with Bureau Van Dijk, D&B/Altares, EcoVadis and others place it at the top of a rather elite list of spend-analysis and supply-risk management solution providers with truly global content-enrichment partnerships and capabilities, running the gamut from basic enrichment to value-added areas (e.g., sustainability).

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Earlier this morning, Aravo announced a $27 million funding round led by Cisco. While you can read the details of the funding round in the above-linked Spend Matters column -- along with some thoughts from the transaction's lead engineer, Aravo's CEO Tim Albinson -- I thought I'd take a few minutes in this post to share my analysis of what the funding round means for this sector. Perhaps most interesting on a superficial level is how with this round, Aravo appears to be migrating away from their supplier information management (SIM) positioning to what they describe as a broader approach to supplier collaboration that encompasses basic vendor management and vendor information management. Of course they summarize this in a three letter acronym -- it must always be three letters, mustn't it -- as enterprise supplier collaboration. Or ESC for short. While this may have a certain branding ring to it, I'm not so sure that moving away from the concept of managing supplier information and leading with the notion of collaboration is the right approach in selling what Aravo does for procurement organizations.

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