An Introduction to Spend Matters Vendor Analysis – Ivalua

Our Spend Matters’ analysts have created a whole series of ‘Vendor Analysis.’ These analyses comprise a full-rounded look at a procurement solution provider’s capabilities, offering facts and unbiased expert analysis to help organisations, suppliers and partners make informed decisions about a solution provider and its offering. Some of the firms that fall under their magnifying glass are originally Europe-based, and may well now have global operations too. One such provider is Ivalua, end-to-end global S2P provider with offices all over the world.

This is an extensive Vendor Snapshot in seven parts, covering:

• Company background and history, access that here
• Upstream detailed solution overview and summary of where and how they recommend a fit – access that here
• Downstream detailed solution overview and summary of where and how they recommend a fit – access that here
• Product strengths– access that here
• Product weaknesses – access that here
• Commentary and SWOT analysis of the firm as a whole – access that here
• Comparative and competitive market overview and summary analysis – access that here

These snapshots offer a final summary analysis and recommendations for organisations that might be considering the firm as a potential solution partner, and talk about how they stack up against the competition.

Ivalua is one of Spend Matters’ vendor snapshots because of its rapid rise to fame, from a firm which “deserves much more respect than it gets from a market that is typically less familiar with it compared to larger peers,” to being “the envy of its peers.” What has accounted for this transformation over the past two years?

“Ivalua has raised two massive rounds of capital, the first in April 2017 when it raised $70 million from private equity firm KKR (to build a war chest to accelerate R&D, expand its global footprint, triple down on marketing and make strategic acquisitions), and the second funding round just a couple of months ago when it raised another $60 million and achieved ‘unicorn’ status. Now it’s the envy of its peers, and we know for a fact that the other big players — Coupa, Jaggaer, Oracle, GEP and SAP Ariba — have taken notice.”

The analysis gives an indepth account of the company’s background and explains what makes it worthy of note:

“Ivalua is one of the few source-to-pay (S2P) providers that has built its end-to-end solution on a single technology stack from the ground up, and one of the fewer still that doesn’t try to grow through an acquire-and-integrate approach … or replatforming … rather, it develops its own native stack. Furthermore, it’s also one of the few that has enough depth and breadth across each core area to enable it to serve as a single technology S2P suite for the procurement organization. That should not be a surprise given that the firm has been building this platform in-house on a single stack for the past 19 years while working with a global customer base.”

“This is important because there comes a point when the overall procurement organization performance beyond sourcing-identified savings and P2P-catalog compliance relies on a single extensible platform approach that goes beyond just functional enablement within procurement.”

But enough of the firm’s accolades, in a detailed solution overview, this independent analysis also looks inside Ivalua’s platform capabilities: its strengths – “functional depth, suite-based capabilities and industry-specific enablement scenarios in the private and public sector … a no-compromise set of capabilities and an underlying platform that is most likely to appeal to procurement and IT organizations that want greater flexibility in executing a procurement technology architecture and strategy than what is offered by the majority of suite-based solutions on the market today,” and its  weaknesses, “Ivalua’s weaknesses are similar to our last review a couple of years ago, but a few weaknesses have been addressed since last time (and while not as deep, still exist against either suite-peers or best-of-breed), and the re-platforming of DirectWorks in particular has gone a long way to address specialized support around direct sourcing.”

The analysis goes on to give a competitive market analysis, taking each of what it sees as the main competitors in turn and analysing how they play differently. It is advisable to read the corresponding Vendor Snapshots for the providers with which Ivalua is being compared to get a real competitive picture.

It completes with a handy overview of each of competitor and the areas in which they differ, where Ivalua has the upper hand, and where it does not. This ‘checklist,’ exposes how the firm stacks up in the global arena in which it is working.

These snapshots are useful, deeply considered and honest analyses of what we can expect from solution providers that are on the analysts’ radar. They are well worth investigating if you are considering a new, or change of, solution provider – or are just keen to understand more about what’s happening between the competitors in the marketplace. They form part of Spend Matters’ Pro offering which is a subscription service (competitively priced and value for money in our opinion) but the introductory part of each vendor analysis, which is substantial, can be read for free, by searching for  ‘Ivalua: vendor snapshot’ in the search bar on the main site.

Of course there’s a lot more to Pro too – check that out here.

You can also see how Ivalua figures in the Q2 SolutionMap ranking.