This research does not constitute an exhaustive list of vendors in any given technology area, but rather is designed to highlight interesting, new and innovative vendors, products and services. Gartner disclaims all warranties, express or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Analysis by Debbie Wilson Why Cool: Decideware got its start helping global companies, such as Procter & Gamble and Pfizer, manage their marketing agencies' overall business performance across multiple divisions and geographic regions with a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-delivered tool for creating and publishing qualitative scorecards. Seeking growth, this vendor has leveraged its capabilities to create several new solutions, including Relationship Optimizer for Strategic Supplier Management, a .NET SaaS application. Features include the ability to survey internal and eternal stakeholders for performance feedback; the capture and recording of qualitative and quantitative data; the circulation of the proposed scores for review and approval; the publication of results on a password-secured supplier portal; and the tracking of progress against an action plan. Several of Decideware’s Agency Relationship Management customers have recently adopted this solution to manage a wider set of key vendors. This solution is cool because of its reported ease of use and traction in a market segment that has proven difficult to win over for many other vendors because of the need to effectively handle and present quantitative and qualitative data. Although there are several alternatives available in the market today, the market is immature; the options are very different. As a result, the competition's offerings are only marginally more mature than Decideware's. Challenges: Relationship Optimizer is a point solution with a narrow focus. It is not architected to document and publish performance on an organization's entire supply base, but on the narrow, high-value slice of strategic partners that demand a broad assessment to fully rate. Furthermore, Relationship Optimizer is implemented as a stand-alone tool, without drill-down into transaction details available, and it does not offer document management for storing related files. Because the company has only 10 employees and is funded by the owners, its ability to scale up to adequately market and support a tool with broader appeal is uncertain. Who Should Care: IT, marketing and facilities groups, which typically manage a number of complex vendor relationships in broadly dispersed organizations, may find this tool well-suited for tracking and managing supplier performance at a high level. General procurement groups that want to ensure that their strategic vendors are performing according to plan may also be interested in this solution. "Handle With Care: Procurement Performance Metrics That Often Mislead" "Hype Cycle for Supply Chain Management and Procurement, 2007" Analysis by Debbie Wilson Why Cool: Technology Insight was founded in 1999 as a consultancy to help companies analyze accounts payable operations and reduce duplicate supplier payments. The service evolved when founder Karl Andersson developed technology to systematically analyze accounts payable extracts and identify problems that often had their root cause in issues with process configuration and breakdown. For example, Technology Insight identifies configuration issues for evaluated receipt settlement (ERS) that lead to duplicate shipments of goods, thereby causing duplicate payments. What is really cool is how this service and technology evolved into something much greater — it is a means to report across multiple heterogeneous systems' comprehensive procure-to-pay statistics, such as the volume of purchase orders going through various spending channels; after-the-fact purchase orders; the number of active suppliers; and the percentage of spending on purchase orders. Using DataShark Supply Chain, procurement may regenerate these statistics periodically and track progress to goals. Technology Insight primarily targets manufacturers with revenue greater than $1 billion, a minimum of 150,000 transactions per year and disparate systems. DataShark Supply Chain features more than 250 standard operational reports and metrics, which Technology Insight customizes to meet each client's needs. Challenges: Technology Insight is a very small, privately held company with fewer than 10 employees. It has grown primarily through Web seminars and word of mouth. The vendor does not market itself well to procurement yet, although the value of the reports and analysis it provides could be significant to many procurement groups. Providers of spending analysis tools could favorably compete with Technology Insight by enhancing their solutions to provide similar reports. Who Should Care: Procurement professionals interested in tracking macro-level metrics of their activity, because this functionality will help them understand business drivers and fine-tune policy to drive efficiency. Accounts payable groups identifying the root causes of overpayment/duplicate payments will also be interested in this solution. Why Cool: The GL Company is a privately held company with nearly 60 employees that markets a solution it defines as "Accounting Intelligence." This is a real-time, virtual OLAP solution that can be deployed over the financial and other modules of ERP suites to provide end users with powerful, easy-to-use inquiry and reporting capabilities that are not available from the ERP system and can only be emulated through investments in business intelligence (BI) tools and technologies that require significant IT involvement to set up and manage. These solutions can be deployed quickly and can be managed by end users with minimal IT support. They access the source data directly in real time and do not require a copy of the data to be spawned, reducing the need for local spreadmarts. The solution does not conflict with any corporate BI strategy because it does not create a separate silo of data. The GL Company has analyzed the data model of various ERP systems and created an optimized view, which enables it to deliver a set of real-time financial analytics with access to the underlying transaction data. A lot of the analysis in the Accounting Intelligence solution is driven by the user-defined dimensions in ERP systems, which are often hard to incorporate into the standard reporting tools provided by ERP vendors. The solution includes a suite of online reports that lets finance users (and, increasingly, other business users) analyze financial data to improve their reporting and speed up the financial close process. This can also bring benefits in improving financial controls to help address Sarbanes-Oxley Act or similar compliance requirements. Financial analytics such as these play an important role in the emerging financial governance market (see "Financial Governance Will Emerge to Enhance Financial Controls and Regulatory Reporting"). Challenges: The GL Company is a small company that may struggle to get its name known in the wider market. However, it has offices in the U.K., the U.S. and Australia, and it does well in places where its sales force establishes contact with prospects. The company's main challenge is that its solutions are only available for Oracle's E-Business Suite and J.D. Edwards World and EnterpriseOne products. However, it's working on expanding its solution to connect to other back-end financial and ERP applications, such as PeopleSoft. This will increase its market opportunity. Another challenge is that the ERP vendors may develop this functionality themselves — some vendors (for example, Agresso and Infor) already have similar capabilities. However, it is more likely that one of the ERP vendors may view The GL Company as an attractive acquisition target. Who Should Care: Users of Oracle E-Business Suite and J.D. Edwards World and EnterpriseOne that want to improve their financial and management reporting for end users in the finance function without disrupting their BI strategy. Analysis by Debbie Wilson Why Cool: The 16-year-old, full-service, strategic-sourcing consultancy Source One Management Services created its own request for quote/proposal/information (RFX) tool several years ago, out of frustration over the shortcomings of the products that were on the market at that time. Soon after its creation, Source One began leaving the tool behind with customers as a final perk when its consulting engagement was over. In 2005, Source One decided to make the tool available, for free, to anyone, and the vendor christened it WhyAbe.com. Since then, Source One has enhanced WhyAbe.com to provide a fully functional solution for organizations of any size. Its payment is a source of prospects and market intelligence for its consulting business. Although Source One doesn't disclose exact pricing or details to paying clients, it does use the deals it sees in the tool to suggest to consulting clients' vendors that have been pricing competitively in a particular market. WhyAbe.com is cool because it is proof that the Facebook "give it away for free in exchange for the opportunity to market to users" social-networking site business strategy has made its way into the commercial software market. It is a portent of more to come. WhyAbe is gaining traction, with 500 buyers currently registered on the site. It is a simple, easy-to-use tool that supports RFX, reverse auctions and, most recently, basic contract management. Functionality includes line-item bid solicitation and Excel download/upload of data. In support of auctions, WhyAbe provides automatic event extension, bid decrements and duplicate-bid blocking. One reference client uses the solution as a request for quotation tool for casual users to choose a supplier from a set of preferred vendors for goods and services that can't be allocated in advance. Support for public supplier registration for opportunities or e-notification through Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds is the newest feature. Buyers can find these prospective suppliers through keyword search. WhyAbe offers a selection of management reporting for oversight. In some jurisdictions, the solution meets the legal requirements to document business awards. Challenges: Although WhyAbe's functionality is best suited for tactical sourcing, it is not implementable as an integrated solution for increasing purchase orders or issuing task orders; this next step must be completed manually. With just 25 employees and a creative business model, it is not clear whether the privately held Source One would be able to field a dramatic uptick in demand. Who Should Care: Organizations that would like to experiment with sourcing technology can learn a lot about what works and what doesn't using WhyAbe. Organizations with limited applications budgets can take advantage of WhyAbe, while spending very little. "Evaluating Sourcing Solution Functionality and Related Vendor Services" © 2008 Gartner, Inc. and/or its Affiliates. 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