Zycus Horizon Dispatch: Building the Partner Ecosystem

Earlier Monday at Zycus’ annual Horizon customer event in Virginia, CEO and founder Aatish Dedhia provided significant evidence that his source-to-pay firm has responded to the need to build out a global partner ecosystem, especially one centered on local customer implementation and enablement.

Zycus global implementation/enablement partners now include more than 35 organizations:

North America

• Acquis Consulting
• Bluvault
• Optis Consulting
• TEG
• Paladin Associates
• Protiviti
• VSG
• RiseNow

Latin America

• Accenture
• BD Advisory
• Center Group
• Deloitte

Europe

• Accenture
• Acxias
• Apsi
• Axys Consultants
• Capgemini
• Deloitte
• Detecon
• I By Intelligence
• Lakran
• MarketGut
• Novell Conseil
• Opti Buy
• Procout
• Stretch
• T-Systems
• Qando

Asia/Pacific

• Abeam
• Arc Blue
• Bristlecone
• Consus/Consus Global
• Current Consulting
• Envision
• ITC Infotech
• KPMG
• NTT
• PKC advisory
• Samurai Sourcing
• Seertree
• Truespend
• Wipro

Partner Focus

Zycus’ partner focus appears to be on a handful of specific, core areas:

• Systems implementation and configuration
• Systems integration
• Change management
• Local enablement (suppliers, sourcing, etc.)

While Zycus is partnered with a number of BPO and managed services firms, we did not learn if its partnerships extend beyond the IT and consulting practices of these providers.

Zycus Partnerships: Looking Ahead

For procurement technology providers, partnership focus (globally or locally) can be as important as partnership reach and breadth. This is especially true as consultancies tend to allocate resources (both financial and training) based on the overall size of a practice and the growth trendline.

As partnerships become more important between technology provider and services firms in general, the degree to which partners jointly go to market together targeting individual accounts (exclusively) increases, a trend Spend Matters has observed in 2018 in numerous larger engagements. These are considerations that as Zycus builds out its global partner ecosystem that it will need to factor into account.