Zip Forward 2024: Forging paths to sustainable success

On September 25, Zip hosted its second annual ‘Zip Forward‘ Conference in San Francisco, California. Headlined “forging paths to sustainable success,” the event attracted roughly 400 live attendees and featured Zip’s new branding and the announcement of new features. Zip also hosted panels, Q&A sessions and more with various procurement and finance leaders from Prudential, Pixar, Arm, Coinbase and others.

As Spend Matters analysts we attended a mini analyst summit which helped free up time for us to talk to fellow attendees during the day’s event. We also caught up with practitioner clients and contacts who were in attendance to kick the proverbial tires and learn more about the ‘space’ (which is partially about intake management, but also concerns broader orchestration, which can mean everything from process coordination/integration to next-gen management of procurement itself).

Announcements at Zip Forward

No single announcement dominated the event since Zip is progressing on so many fronts simultaneously. The firm is clearly the market’s pace setter. It has unicorn valuation status, ~450 customers (buoyed heavily by its west coast connection, heavy Y Combinator funding and rapid adoption by enterprise customers) and serious engineering investment (more than two-thirds going to R&D/product) and activity (1M lines of code in the past year, 10K code changes, 500 feature requests, etc.).

Zip announced its new brand design at the event, which includes a new logo, a different color scheme and other changes, such as the tagline “no business works alone.” The changes come in conjunction with Zip’s expansion in broader procurement orchestration and into native source-to-pay capabilities, complementing its foundational intake management focus.

Besides the brand marketing work, such as using concepts of ‘Flow’ to achieve ‘Peak’ capabilities and performance, the unabashed ownership of its position as a procurement orchestration platform hits the right notes for a CPO regarding:

• Procurement processes as the clear scope with a focus on spend management more than supply management (given the current focus on indirect spend). So, the term ‘spend orchestration’ that some like to use is really just upgraded spend management.
• Cross-functional orchestration beyond intake. CPOs like seeing this focus rather than CIOs pushing other existing generic tools from areas like CRM, IT/service management, Business Process Automation, even though those CPOs also are attracted to filling in and connecting the spaces like TPRM, Spend Planning and other areas in need of orchestration, e.g., direct in SCM — which is a whole separate discussion! TPRM is a huge opportunity right now, as document-centric approaches die when they reach the scale needed to perform supplier management (i.e., management of risk, compliance, performance, onboarding speed and supplier collaboration that respects/accommodates supplier requirements) with fine-grained operating models. See our risk management guide and ongoing TPRM coverage.
• A platform (which is NOT an app) that builds app experiences to orchestrate and integrate processes and existing systems with highly flexible foundational data that leverages a graph DB, of course, and powers all this, even though the data model breadth itself is a work in progress while Zip’s native app support continues to grow, and the AI that ‘prosumes’ the data for use in various Gen/agentic AI scenarios.

This last requirement may be rather technical, but the enabled capabilities allow for earlier, deeper and tailored stakeholder engagement to provide better experience/satisfaction, adoption — which, ironically, is a characteristic that Coupa has continually held as the North Star — spend compliance and influence on pre-sourced spend. ZIP says it wins on the above capabilities as well as fast implementation, low TCO due to a more flexible configuration framework and the extent of pre-built cross-functional integrations and claims of over $4 billion in customer savings. Although such value measurement frameworks can be highly ‘variable’, a back-of-the-envelope calculation puts the ROI in the territory of 40x. This is obviously a story far beyond augmenting requisitions and category ‘smart’ forms!

Zip also highlighted some recent features and shared some plans for the near future. Many were centered around AI, for example, in supplier search, Zip AI now surfaces contracted (preferred) suppliers to help users to more quickly identify optimal suppliers (which may not really be optimal, but likely better than having to inadvertently go maverick and waste precious resources in sourcing, qualification, etc.). AI-enabled invoice coding is also offered based on historical coding patterns within the organization for more accurate suggestions.

Finally, Zip also now supports cross-catalog purchasing, allowing users to search for and purchase items across multiple catalogs within the Zip user interface. None of these areas are exactly groundbreaking, though the last one is still a key concern for many organizations. That said, these are explicit markers of progress in user functionality, while the technical capabilities being developed by many providers in this emerging competency area are not as visible to the mass market.

Other notes and takeaways

A notable takeaway from the event is the amount of customers who use Zip for different purposes. Of course, some will only use the solution for intake management and its associated need for orchestration, while others may use its native sourcing or downstream capabilities. But the different purposes in this case go beyond modules. Customers may use Zip in conjunction with PPM tools, for example. In other cases, customers may use it in conjunction with several best-of-breed solutions.

One of the most noteworthy examples, though, is the amount of customers who use Zip to enable future transformations. Considering its reputation as a next-gen procurement platform, more forward-thinking organizations may see Zip not just as an add-on to an existing procurement software tech stack but as a starting point for future additions. Intake may help automate and open the proverbial front doors, but procurement must then both create a great experience inside the door and engage stakeholders to help guide and orchestrate their buying processes, rather than sitting and waiting for late-stage requests when value creation levers are less available. Real guided buying, a term coined by one of this article’s authors in 2006 (a fact hilariously pointed out by a speaker at the Zip conference) is actually fairly complicated, but making the complex simple is harder than the opposite. This is Zip’s sweet spot to tackle (and open to others as well).

For instance, starting with Zip as the central hub for all intake and orchestration, then adding a best-of-breed CLM or supplier management solution down the road while keeping Zip as the primary place for stakeholders can help increase adoption and ROI for both investments. These organizations see Zip’s value as more than just technology — it is also about the processes that Zip can instill as a modern, configurable S2P next-gen application suite built upon its platform.

This serves as a key point for Zip’s scalability. Last year’s recap of ‘Zip Forward’ inspired a follow-up post discussing the future of the intake and orchestration market. One theme from that post was the long-term viability of intake-focused solutions that do not offer any native S2P capabilities. Beyond Zip’s advancements in that arena, its presence on the market as a starting point, rather than just a connector, makes it more future-proofed than generic process automation platforms without deep spend/supply management specific data models.

This capability is especially important not only for enabling orchestration with existing fragmented customer solution stacks in the enterprise space but also for building out a next-generation virtual suite that cannot be achieved easily with existing legacy tech architectures. This capability, especially when implemented via knowledge graphs to translate to the world of AI, including language and action models, is key to harnessing the long-term growth tailwinds of procurement-specific intake/orchestration providers that hope to survive and grow — which inherently means beyond the confines of core S2P processes.

Final thoughts

OK, let’s wrap this up. The Zip Forward event was packed with customers who have been eager to share how Zip has unlocked value for their organizations. And it’s also exciting to see a next generation of procurement talent (many coming out of top-notch procurement-specific supply chain programs) who have hopped around a bit, partly because they have no patience for inadequate procurement mindsets, practices and tools.

Moreover, the announcement of Zip’s rebrand was notable, considering how new this market is — and we have also been trying to standardize terms ourselves! Creating and defining a new category is challenging but exciting. It is even reminiscent of the earlier days of Ariba with ‘Enterprise Spend Management’ (albeit focused heavily on savings and indirect spend) and then Coupa as it began to set the standard for S2P suites with ‘Business Spend Management.’

As businesses must build next-generation operating models to orchestrate (and thus build agility and resilience to handle increasing complexity — a tale told well by the last three installments of the Deloitte CPO Survey), they need next-generation orchestration-centric technology platforms that can build next-generation future-proofed intelligent applications and experiences (including AI apps like intelligent agents) that live comfortably, cost effectively and transparently in a very complex technology landscape.

As was the case last year, conversations at Zip Forward with both Zip employees and customers will lead to further Spend Matters analysis and commentary (perhaps on the tailwinds of orchestration, which have evolved in the past year). As a side note, we’ve finalized our granular requirements (i.e., the question-specific 5-level evaluation criteria like we use for all SolutionMap benchmark criteria) for intake management and orchestration and road tested them with numerous practitioners, vendors and consulting organizations.

If you’d like more information on this, please contact us!

And if you want some extensive freemium content on the topic, check out our guide for Intake and Orchestration solutions.