AnyData Solutions: Vendor Analysis 2020 Update (Part 2) — Product Strengths & Weaknesses

Part 2 of this Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis update explores the strengths and weaknesses of AnyData’s spend analytics and contract management solution, providing facts and expert analysis to help procurement organizations and other customers decide whether AnyData is the right fit for their needs.

Since our 2017 review, AnyData has added a strength: metric definition and management. And it improved on old strengths, like rapid configuration and ease of use. Also its visualization engine is sharper, faster and more configurable by the end user. Areas for improvement include more marketing and industry customization. We’ll discuss all of these and more later.

As we indicated in Part 1, AnyData Solutions is not just a stand-alone spend analytics toolset that includes “the basics.” Rather, it is a stand-alone platform for capturing, managing, sharing and collaborating on structured datasets of any type — which can come from flat files, spreadsheets, databases, live API feeds, documents scanned by OCR and just about any data source you can think of.

As an end-to-end analytics platform, AnyData is quite different from other approaches to spend analytics on the market today. On many levels, AnyData is closer to the data-centric heritage of BIQ, or the newer Spendata solution (founded by a BIQ co-Founder), as it is fundamentally a self-service analytics solution, compared with the vast majority of spend analytics providers, which prefer to handle cleansing and classification activities “as a service,” even if they offer to sell the classification engine separately (which rarely happens).

The first installment of this three-part series provided a company and solution overview and a recommended fit list of criteria for firms considering AnyData. Part 3 will offer a company SWOT analysis, a look at AnyData’s competitors and a user selection guide.