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Segmenting the Procurement Tech Market: A Simple Visual Guide to Picking the Right Software Tools

Identifying potential software vendors that fit your procurement organization’s current (and possibly future) needs is unfortunately easier said than done. We won’t place all the blame on any one instigator, but the Google search algorithm is doing more harm than good when directing technology evaluators toward “definitive” directories for procurement solutions.

Many of the top search results for phrases like “procurement software tools” aim more for breadth of coverage than depth or, frankly, accuracy. Absent from most top 10/50/100 lists are clear, logical segmentations of procurement software vendors into easily understood areas of the market landscape.

We hear this not only in our conversations with practitioners but also, oddly, in our discussions with software companies. Many vendors think they belong in a market segment like e-procurement (because they support electronic means of procurement), when e-procurement specifically covers transactional purchasing software as enabled by catalogs, requisitioning, and ordering/shopping tools.

So let’s clear the polluted SEO air.

This Spend Matter PRO brief provides a simple visual segmentation guide to the procurement tech market, segmenting software vendors into clear buckets that reflect the source-to-pay process. The aim is not to provide a definitive or exhaustive market overview but to begin creating clarity where there is still confusion for this market. 

And as we add to this segmentation project, we hope to create increasingly meaningful, interactive versions of this market segmentation that further help procurement organizations, software companies, and the consultants and investors who support these groups all make better decisions. After all, these are the providers driving the overall "total addressable market," or TAM, for the sector.

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