Webinar – A look behind the 50/50 and Future 5 selection process

The Spend Matters analyst team will host a webinar ‘Shaping the Future of Procurement: An Inside Look at the 10th Annual Spend Matters 50/50 Lists’ on Tuesday, October 31, 11:00 a.m. EST.

The 50/50 and Future 5 are three lists which consist of 105 vendors. Each year, the Spend Matters analysts spend weeks whittling down the various vendors they have seen and demo’d over the year into these three lists. These represent the best-in-class solutions that the industry needs to know about, the up-and-coming, growing firms to keep an eye on and a few that are just starting but have already made their potential impact evident. Wrangling the entire procurement technology industry into such a list, however, is an absolute monster of a task.

“This year’s lists are the first to feature a numerical scoring scale to quantify factors previously considered ‘soft’ as the first step in the analyst selection process,” Nikhil Gaur, research analyst at Spend Matters, explains. “In conjunction with criteria added in previous years such as mindshare in the market and customer reference requirements, the process behind these lists has become more programmatic and objective. The market can be confident that the providers chosen for these lists are truly the most impressive in the industry.”

To the outside reader, though, this explanation may appear as opaque as the lists themselves. To illustrate how these chosen providers have proven themselves as the most impressive, the webinar discussion will ask:

• What are the boundaries that relative newcomers are pushing, and how are they doing it?
• How did the leading providers continue to raise the industry standard?
• What is the environment that informs the impressiveness of a procurement technology start-up?

That said, what makes a vendor excellent does not occur in a vacuum. There are the broader technology trends that inform what makes a vendor stand out. So, attendees will also have the opportunity to hear the analyst team’s thoughts on what technologies will help a practitioner’s procurement department become more efficient.

The conversation will give specific attention to:

• The rise of Intake Management.
• The impact of Generative AI on the market.
• The ongoing debate between purchasing a suite, a point solution or a layering of the two.

The procurement world is constantly changing, which means that moments to pause and reflect on those changes are rare. If you missed the live webinar, take the opportunity presented by Spend Matters to learn what is shaping the future of procurement.