The A to Z of Spend Matters Future 5 2021 — Introducing Malbek

As markets evolve, grow and mature, supply and demand changes. Businesses must continue to adapt and so must the tools they use to support them. The procurement technology market too is rapidly evolving to respond to changing needs, talent maturity, compliance, regulation, risk, faster time-to-market and more. It’s not easy for heads of procurement to keep a watchful eye on the new, adaptive technologies and capabilities that are entering what is already a very crowded space. But Spend Matters does.

Our procurement technology analysts scour the market each year to find those new solution providers that can fulfil a very specialist and niche role to cater for procurement’s current needs. After weeks of strong debate and scrutiny based on their extensive market knowledge of the procurement technologies they review, analyse and benchmark every day, they wheedle down tens of start-ups to find five that they believe are exciting, have a rapidly rising presence in the market, are in it for the long run, and which every CPO should have on their radar.

These start-ups invariably take existing technologies much further to address the problems they can’t, or are introducing a new category of automation that tackles new challenges in interesting ways. We believe these companies deserve greater visibility, especially in a market which is increasingly consolidating and diluting buyer choices.

The Future 5 list is a true complement to our 50 Providers to Watch and 50 Providers to Know lists, which highlight the more established tech firms you should either be watching or get to know. Many outstanding procurement technology start-ups move from early-stage to market contenders quickly, graduating to the ‘To Watch’ list.

So we are delighted to introduce you to our Future 5s as we capture their voices. In no order of preference other than alphabetically they are:

• Archlet
• Circulor
• Malbek
• Pactum
• Zip

Introducing Malbek

Malbek is a Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) vendor that focuses on maintaining an approachable interface, configurable settings, easy integrations and a strong, modern cloud platform. It hits a sweet spot of strong technical underpinnings, check-the-box CLM functionality and innovations all at a reasonable price point. The vendor can both scale down to small customers and up to larger deployments. And with its emphasis on self-service usability, Malbek appears to deliver fast return on investment that eludes more complex CLM projects.

Read more about what Malbek does and our reasons for its selection here.

We talked to Malbek’s CEO and CoFounder Hemanth Puttaswamy to understand more about …

How Malbek came into being

“Malbek exists to create products that delight its customers while building an organization made up of exceptional people who make everything run smoothly. We stand apart as a company that is both remarkable and refreshing with a unique culture that creates an amazing working environment.

“When it comes to our origins: When I was working as an executive in a public company, a yearly audit of financials showed major issues with the way revenue was recognized across our 2,500+ customers. The company had to restate financials going back ten years. This is when I realized the impact of badly managed contractual terms. A light bulb went off that there is a clear need to have a solution that would standardize contracting processes with complete enterprise visibility for every business.

“This sparked a fire, which led me to research the available solutions to manage contracts. It was painfully obvious that implementing a contracting solution would take years, cost a lot, and there was no guarantee of it working. In fact, 50 percent of the implementations have failed.

“A few years later I was fortunate to work with two amazing co-founders, Matt Patel who had a decade of experience in Contract Lifecycle Management and Madhu Poolu who is a technology guru, to start Malbek. We set out to re-imagine this entire space where we simplify end-user experience as well as admin experience.

“Implementing and configuring any contracting process can be done in just weeks, not months or years, with self-service functionality that a non-technical person is able to operate without paying millions of dollars on services and having a seamless AI engine embedded across the lifecycle.”

What’s Malbek’s greatest strength?

“Legacy CLM solutions are extremely difficult and expensive to implement and operate with feature bloat. The next- generation solutions in the market are too shallow with narrow functionality focused on a specific persona or use case. They cannot scale with complexity when enterprises have advanced needs to automate business processes.

“There are many point-solutions which focus on one or two areas of contract lifecycle use cases but not the entire span. We built Malbek as a true enterprise-grade Contract Lifecycle Management solution with pre-built integrations to popular applications and a real emphasis on ‘L’ where we have a LifecycleAI™ engine. These are core parts of the platform solving the complete need of contracting as a one-stop-shop, with a no-code self-service setup.”

What’s next for Malbek?

“We believe we have just scratched the surface with AI. Our many algorithms learn from the user’s behavior, collaboration, contract syntax and semantics using Deep AI NLP.

“Our vision is to be the middle-office platform that builds a seamless bridge between CRM and ERP with anything related to source-to-pay and quote-to-cash processes that will have 95%+ of mundane tasks completely automated with more advanced AI and statistical algorithms that improves the effectiveness with our patent pending algorithms at least ten-fold than what it is today.”

What does it mean to be a Future 5?

“It’s an honor to be selected as a Future 5. When we envisioned building the solution ground-up, we had one important and basic principle in mind: positively impact organizations on both buy- and sell-side of contracting.

“Contract Lifecycle Management is one solution that can help the topline for the company by improving the efficiency and effectiveness of deal cycles and also the bottom line by capturing and flagging all the commitments and obligations from third-party paper from every vendor ensuring the enterprise is utilizing the products and services that they buy effectively. Being recognized as a Future 5 is fuel for our rocket ship, which has already taken off, and we have many more galaxies to visit.”

Many thanks to Malbek for sharing their success with us. We hope the Future 5 broadens our readers’ perception of what’s possible with technology to help you position your organization to address the future’s challenges.

The full Future 5 and 50/50 lists can be found in the Spend Matters Almanac, our free vendor directory, where Malbek sits within the Contract Lifecycle Management (CLM) category.

If you haven’t already, please register your own organization if you’d like to make a start on getting your solution in front of the technology analysts.

You can also find our existing coverage of Malbek here in our more in-depth subscription PRO analysis:

Malbek: Vendor Analysis — Solution Overview for Contract Management, Roadmap, Customer Feedback, Competitors, Analyst Insights