Aquiire: What Makes it Great (E-Procurement SolutionMap Analysis)

We admit it. Despite the cleverness of the brand, Aquiire is a name that none of Spend Matters team members can spell right on the first try (nor on the second or third). But the e-procurement vendor stands out for more than having the only pun within its name and reminding us about how badly we are at spelling. It’s one of the only tech providers in the procurement sector that comes to mind which has successfully graduated from product/process enabler to a core solution in and of itself — one built off the plumbing of a unique, patented extended catalog management capability that addresses many of the real world limitations of managing spend beyond what’s contained within buyer or supplier hosted catalogs.

But this is only one of the things that makes Aquiire stand out from the procure-to-pay pack. Join us in this SolutionMap Insider analysis as we explore and unpack the nuances of what makes Aquiire great.

Nearly all technology providers participating in SolutionMap aren’t perfect (i.e., in analyst speak, “up and to the right”) for every business scenario. Even if a vendor has outstanding capability in certain areas — functionality, services or something else that helps it win business — to perform consistently above the functional and customer benchmark is a rarity. But there are reasons that specialist providers in different markets beat the big names in how they support specific organizational needs.

“What Makes it Great” is a recurring column that shares insights from each quarterly SolutionMap report for SolutionMap Insider Subscribers, exploring what makes these specialized (and in certain cases not-so-specialized) technology providers great for reasons that a simple graphic would fail to capture. Based on the rigorous SolutionMap evaluation process, customer reference reviews and expert eye from looking at products comparatively during demonstrations, the “What Makes it Great” series takes a fact-based approach to surfacing what makes individual vendors great.

In each research brief we translate each provider’s geek-level secret sauce into plain English and show precisely where the provider excels and where it convincingly “beats the benchmark” in SolutionMap. And we offer up a checklist for ideal customer scenarios in which procurement, finance and supply chain organizations should consider the vendor, along with basic facts to size ‘em up quickly.