Icertis launches new ‘contract intelligence’ branding, emphasizing ability to balance urgent and future customer needs

Icertis, a contract management specialist, launched a new branding strategy today, describing the next evolution of the contract lifecycle management (CLM) space as the era of “contract intelligence” with its focus on mid-market enterprises.

Contract intelligence refers to the ability of an advanced contract management platform to dynamically link entitlements and obligations within contracts to any business process, Icertis told Spend Matters in a recent briefing. Such a system aims to enable greater speed and flexibility for businesses in managing commitments as circumstances change throughout the lifecycle of an agreement.

The new branding concept signals Icertis’s intent to stay one step ahead of the market by defining what the next generation of CLM systems should look like — especially for mid-size customers, a segment Icertis called out directly as a group that would benefit from recent platform updates.

In keeping with the brand, the Icertis Applied Cloud platform will rebrand to become the Icertis Contract Intelligence platform. The name comes with a new brand position and values, which the vendor summarizes in a single sentence.

“Icertis is the only contract intelligence platform you can trust to keep your business out in front, now and into the future,” said Jessica Shapiro, Vice President of Corporate Marketing at Icertis.

The phrase “out in front, now and into the future,” acknowledges the critical position contract management has come into as the world rapidly shifts to remote and digitized processes in response to the coronavirus pandemic. Yet today’s environment will also continue to shift into the near future, to include not only the core repository and authoring capabilities businesses expect from CLM systems but also the “contract intelligence” capabilities Icertis describes. Because of these market changes, it’s imperative for companies to evolve their contract capabilities as well.

Icertis said contract intelligence can help companies make quicker, more informed decisions while visibly improving CSR, such as by ensuring the ethical sourcing of conflict minerals throughout multitier supply chains or enabling rapid onboarding of diverse suppliers. Another benefit outlined by Icertis is the ability for customers signing up with the platform to grow while it simultaneously grows the platform.

Growth is a key in Icertis’ new branding strategy. It provides a subtle expansion for the 11-year-old company. Icertis has traditionally played strongest with multinational corporations like Daimler or Airbus that hold significant complexities. Now, Icertis is starting to emphasize its ability to service mid-market companies — firms with roughly around $50 million or more in revenue.

“Icertis has maintained a top spot in the contract management market due to its deep support for both the essentials and its continuing expansion of what a CLM platform can do. Organizations evaluating potential vendors will find that Icertis is a strong fit for many cross-enterprise use cases and that the firm does not shy away from complexity where alternatives might falter,” said Nick Heinzmann, research analyst at Spend Matters.

“At the same time, however, many of Icertis’s recently developed capabilities, particularly around AI-based contract data extraction, can be immediately useful even to non-enterprise-grade businesses. This expansion of ‘contract intelligence’ to address a wider swath of the potential customers injects a new competitive dynamic into the market, as well as illustrates how Icertis plans to maintain its benchmark-topping functionality scoring going forward.”

While Icertis looks to change today and the near future, it also plans to be around for the long-haul of contract intelligence. It is not inventing a new category for procurement. Rather, the new messaging hopes to “push the boundaries of what’s possible with CLM” while helping customers “solve problems they had no idea could be solved with contracts.”