Icertis: Vendor Analysis (Part 1) — Background & Solution Overview

Icertis is a best-of-breed enterprise-class contract lifecycle management (CLM) application platform that spans the buy side (i.e., purchase contracts to support the source-to-pay process) and the sell side (i.e., sales contracts used in the quote-to-cash process), and supports any type of commercial agreement. Icertis is a purpose-built CLM platform (and associated CLM app suite) that itself is built primarily on top of Microsoft’s Azure technical infrastructure. Its design really shines for complex enterprises that need not just a deep functionality stack but also a great deal of flexibility, scalability and personalized usability, all geared toward enabling commercial excellence beyond core contract management workflows.

Icertis’ deep and flexible technical stack is not a technology story, though, but rather a business story of how to embed CLM outside of core functionality (i.e., contract authoring, approvals, repository management and compliance analytics) and into the broader fabric of commercial excellence in large enterprises. Why? Out of all of the information entities in a business, there is nothing more foundational, or business critical, than the contract. A contract is the ultimate commercial system of record, and as value chains become increasingly complicated and outsourced, the required business agility must get translated into commercial agility. Fundamentally, CLM systems help mitigate risk and prevent value leakage, but they will also increasingly be critical to enabling new commercial relationships that support collaboration, new sources of value and the total lowest costs to treat the risks within the relationship.

Additionally, the platform can be used to transform agreements from mere commercial artifacts containing legal obligations to “containers” of commitments that are used to satisfy stakeholders such as shareholders, regulators and NGOs. The commitments can also be used as risk mitigations for various risk types that can be modeled in the system. The CLM platform thus becomes a way to drive risk and compliance workflows alongside commercially related workflows that touch the contracts. All of these requirements in turn dictate the need for an equally agile CLM platform that is functionally deep and highly configurable (e.g., APIs, analytics, workflow integration, data model extensibility).

This Spend Matters PRO vendor snapshot provides facts and analysis to help buying organizations make informed decisions about whether they need a solution like Icertis, and how this provider stacks up against our CLM solution framework and other competitive CLM solutions. Spend Matters walked through detailed demonstrations of the product and also conducted multiple reference call interviews to help formulate this analysis, which has also been guided by existing Spend Matters analyst knowledge based on ongoing discussions with practitioners, competitors and consultants. Part 1 of this Icertis Vendor snapshot analysis provides a company background and detailed solution overview, as well as a summary recommended fit suggestion for when organizations should consider this provider. The rest of this multipart research brief covers product strengths and weaknesses, competitor and SWOT analysis, user selection guides and insider evaluation and selection considerations.