Seal Software: Vendor Analysis (Part 2) — Product Strengths and Weaknesses

What is a contract? Distilled to its essence, a contract is an agreement that defines one or multiple obligations between parties. A contract could be as simple as a standard mutual non-disclosure agreement or a relatively short agreement to purchase goods in exchange for a payment. In more complex cases, a contract could be a complex swap agreement in which cash (or credit) does not change hands but various good, obligations, raw materials, finished products, derivative products or other commitments do (trading companies are especially familiar with these types of scenarios).

All of these examples have one thing in common: they represent binding agreements between parties. Yet in most procurement organizations today, we are typically not aware of the majority of the contracts that we directly — or those in the business — have created.

Contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions can help bring certain contracts under management –– much as we bring “spend” under management from a purchasing perspective. Yet just as e-procurement solutions do not address the full continuum of spend, so too do CLM solutions fail to address all the procurement and third-party obligations that our companies have already created in the past, or may create in the future, outside a CLM tool. And this is why Seal Software, the pioneer of the contract discovery, search and analytics sector, presents a compelling case that all organizations, regardless of where they are in their digital procurement transformation journey, should invest separately in a contract intelligence strategy, alongside procurement technology suites and CLM.

This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Snapshot explores Seal Software’s product strengths and weaknesses, providing facts and expert analysis to help procurement organizations decide whether they should consider this class of solution alongside other CLM, P2P and other procurement technology investments. It also offers a critique (pros/cons) of the user interface.