Lately and following his 25-page Forrester Wave™ Vendor report for Q2 2007, Andrew Bartels updated his views about top procurement providers: Ariba remains the Goliath of the market, while competition is getting closer, succeeding in developing differentiators, and sometimes over-exceeding Ariba’s performance on specific functionality, product categories or sectors. Not a surprise really for me, as I was already regretting since years the lack of innovative leadership from the Californian headquartered company. Hopefully, Ariba innovated and expanded lately its supplier network capabilities by offering – at last! – to its subscribing suppliers the ability to find new business opportunities online as ‘ the new functionality allows buyers to publish RFX documents to a public site enabling registered and unregistered suppliers to respond to them in real time. More than 150,000 suppliers registered on Ariba Supplier Network are automatically notified of events that fit their profile, and unregistered suppliers can quickly and easily search postings by commodity type, geographic location and buyer’ (Source: Ariba news).
Forrester Wave™ Vendor report for Q2 2007 – Executive summary
eProcurement solutions play a key role in improving purchasing processes in enterprises through automating requisitions and purchase orders for goods and services, decentralizing buying, connecting to suppliers directly, and improving employee compliance with preferred supplier policies. Using a combination of vendor surveys, product demos, and client references, Forrester evaluated 14 leading eProcurement solutions vendors across 118 criteria and found that:
Ariba, BasWare, Oracle iProcurement (Oracle), Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise eProcurement (PeopleSoft), and SAP established eProcurement leadership for overall goods and services buying and supplier support. Fieldglass and IQNavigator lead in services procurement, while Ariba, BasWare, Oracle, and PeopleSoft provide good support for the buying of both services and goods.
For supplier network services, Ariba was the clear Leader with SAP coming up, joined by Ketera Technologies, Perfect Commerce, and Quadrem in the Strong Performer sector with above-average scores for current offering; BasWare, cc-hubwoo, ePlus, IBX, Oracle, and PeopleSoft were not far behind.
SciQuest, while appearing to score lower in the general market, does very well for its target markets of universities and research labs.
Source: The Forrester – Andrew Bartels
To attract readers, Andrew gave different titles to his report. Those titles are saying a lot by themselves about the market but if you want to know – a bit – more, just click on the following links to read a specific executive summary:
- Ariba Is Still A Top eProcurement Solution
- Oracle PeopleSoft Enterprise eProcurement Is A Well-Rounded eProcurement Solution
- BasWare Is A Strong Newcomer In eProcurement Solutions
- Ketera Technologies Provides A Cost-Effective eProcurement Solution
- Quadrem Is A Good eProcurement Solution For Companies With Ops In Developing Countries
- SciQuest Offers A Compelling eProcurement Solution For The Research Community
- IQNavigator Is A Leader In eProcurement Solutions For Services Purchases
- cc-hubwoo Offers A European-Flavored eProcurement And Supplier Solution
- ePlus Offers A Competitive eProcurement Solution With Links To Tech Product Sales