Zip: Vendor Analysis — Company background, solution overview, roadmap, Zip’s competitors, tech-selection tips, analyst summary

This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis will give an overview of the origin of Zip's solution, as well as a brief description of its functionalities as the start-up tries to forge a new technology solution category.

As a technology analyst, you attend a lot of product demonstrations. And, the source-to-pay domain is a very dynamic space. The S2P market now sees constant changes on offer — providers bringing new capabilities, mergers & acquisitions, and new players. For this last category, the challenge is to find their place in a crowded space. Spend Matters offers rankings of veteran vendors and start-ups in our SolutionMap view of the market, but for vendors, differentiation is critical to getting attention and traction. This is exactly where Zip is. However, it does it in an interesting way — inventing a new segment adjacent to and overlapping P2P, as it markets itself as an "intake-to-procure" solution.

Zip’s value proposition is to provide requesters and stakeholders with an "intelligent, intuitive front-end to their ERP or P2P." Zip is therefore meant to be the one place for any employee to initiate a new purchase or vendor request through a flexible, configurable intake that requires no code to change. Zip will then support communication and approvals to ensure that the need is clearly understood and that all sign-offs are obtained.

This PRO post also will highlight areas in Zip’s roadmap for the future, and we’ll share insights into Zip’s competitors from the P2P market. We also will have some key analyst takeaways about Zip's strengths and weaknesses.