Author Archives: Andrew Karpie

In Part 2 of this Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis, we'll look at VNDLY’s competitors, examine the market in which they compete and provide a company SWOT assessment.

Over the last five to seven years, the market for technology solutions that enable the sourcing and management of contingent workforce and services has become increasingly active and diverse in terms of new providers/solutions. But for many years, legacy VMS providers anchored in temp staffing ruled the contingent workforce segment, while complex service purchasing was shoe-horned incompletely into source-to-pay/e-procurement solutions.

Technology-driven innovation and changes in both the supply- and demand-sides of the market are calling into question legacy solution footprints and architectures. VNDLY was the first new solution that challenged legacy VMS providers, and other new entrants have appeared on the market. Organizations have begun to assign greater importance to managing their large and growing non-employee workforces (agency temps, other contract workers and those that work for service providers of various kinds). Organizations seemed to be looking for a modern alternative to their legacy VMS solutions, and VNDLY’s entry into the market seems to be well-timed.

In Part 1, we focused on company details, a brief solution overview, and VNDLY solution’s strengths and weaknesses. In our third and final installment, we will provide a more in-depth overview of VNDLY’s platform capabilities.

Let’s now look at VNDLY’s competitors and market/industry position.

This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis will provide an overview and analyst insights into VNDLY and its non-employee workforce management platform.

VNDLY was founded in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 2017 by industry outsiders based on their view that enterprise contingent workforce management requirements and expectations were increasing and new technology was available (leaving an opportunity for a new entrant). Today, VNDLY competes directly with VMS providers and serves a growing number of mainly Fortune 500 companies across a range of industries, primarily in North America. The company employs about 150 people and has raised $58 million in private equity since 2017.

Part 1 of this three-part PRO series also will have some company details, a brief solution overview and VNDLY’s solution strengths and weaknesses. In Part 2, we will provide a company SWOT assessment and a look at VNDLY’s competitors and the market. In our third and final installment, we will provide a more in-depth overview of VNDLY’s platform capabilities.

In late September, we had an opportunity to speak with Kevin Akeroyd, who became PRO Unlimited’s CEO in July 2020. PRO Unlimited is a well-established managed services player in the contingent workforce space. The company is notable as a vendor-neutral MSP with its own VMS technology.

One of Akeroyd’s first moves as CEO at PRO Unlimited was relocating the company’s headquarters from Boca Raton, Florida, to San Francisco, California, a change that fits with what we learned about Akeroyd’s vision of the company and the role of technology in it.

What follows is a sampling of topics discussed in our hour-long, detailed conversation in which Akeroyd shared his view of the contingent workforce industry and how he saw PRO Unlimited addressing organizations’ present and future contingent workforce requirements.

The vast majority of spend on contingent workers goes through staffing suppliers. More procurement control and VMS have exerted continuous pressure on supply bases to perform with greater efficiency, driving suppliers to use more technology for a wide variety of purposes. COVID-19 has brought a shock to an industry that may cause staffing businesses to rethink how they operate at a more fundamental level.

Bullhorn, the leading software solution provider to staffing firms, recently published the results of a survey that took the temperature of some 800 staffing company respondents globally. Bullhorn’s recent survey posed a number of questions to firms in May of this year about how they were adapting to the COVID-19-induced demand shock that came months prior.

This Spend Matters PRO article looks at the Bullhorn survey data and adds context, as well as providing our perspective on the temp-staffing supplier industry segment looking forward into 2021.

This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Analysis offers a candid take on Catalant and its capabilities. Catalant provides enterprises with digital platform-based solutions that enable enterprises to conduct strategic initiatives and projects with high-caliber expert business talent. This brief includes an overview of Catalant and its solution offerings, a summary solution evaluation, a SWOT analysis and a selection checklist for companies that might consider the provider.

MBO Partners’ acquisition of MindSumo last week may have raised some eyebrows — or at least caused some puzzlement — in the relatively slow-moving contingent workforce industry. But while the oft-declared statement, “the world of work is changing,” is now a bit of truism, MBO’s acquisition and platform strategy now puts the company squarely in the middle of some of those long-term changes.

In this Spend Matters PRO brief, we describe MBO Partners and MindSumo as solution providers, frame the broader business context of the acquisition and discuss MBO’s strategic acquisition perspective (informed by a recent conversation with MBO’s CEO, Miles Everson). We also provide our own perspective on the significance of MBO’s move.

Welcome to the October 2020 edition of Spend Matters Insiders’ Hot List, a monthly look at the contingent workforce and services (CW/S) space. For those new to the Hot List, each edition covers the prior month’s important or interesting technology and innovation developments in the CW/S space. Find details on platforms, Fiverr — and one site that helps source workers for evictions.

While COVID-19 has disrupted the U.S. economy in ways which were practically inconceivable a year ago, it has also overturned long-standing, fundamental assumptions of how businesses must operate. Organizations, for example, are finding that they can operate with a larger remote workforce, they can flex their now-significant contingent workforces, and they have access to technology that can make business transformation possible. This should also be a time for procurers of contingent workforce and services (CW/S) to re-evaluate and reset their assumptions. Right?

This is the third part of the “Coronavirus impacts the world of work” series focusing on contingent workforce/services management in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic. Each part of the series aligns to one of the four stages of the crisis that we mapped out in the spring:

• Reactive/acute stage: Coronavirus affects the world of work — How can businesses cope with the COVID-19 outbreak? (March 2020)
• Transition/mitigation stage: Coronavirus affects the world of work: Facing the next phase of the crisis (April 2020)
• Recovery/upswing stage: Coronavirus impacts the world of work: Achieving agility in an uncertain economic recovery (Current)
• Long-run/business-as-usual stage (TBD)

Part 3 of this series now addresses what we called the recovery/upswing stage, looking at what it means, assessing the current environment and trends, and presenting considerations for organizations and CW/S practitioners.

This Spend Matters PRO research brief provides an introduction to TalentNet, a direct sourcing and brand-based talent acquisition solution. It’s a software-as-a-service offering that enables businesses to attract, assess, onboard and manage contract workers — and now, permanent workers.

TalentNet falls within the solution category that Spend Matters refers to as Direct Sourcing of Workforce/Services (DSW/S). The company has recently expanded its solution to support direct sourcing of permanent employees as well as contract workers.

TalentNet was covered in the Spend Matters SolutionMap for software solutions that enable businesses to direct source and manage their contract workforce and small service providers (where it was mapped as a SolutionMap Value Leader (upper right quadrant) for our Nimble, Deep, Turn-Key and Global personas).

In An Executive’s Guide to Direct Sourcing of Contract Work/Services Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, Spend Matters covered the modern concept of direct sourcing; the emerging, digital direct sourcing ecosystem; enabling direct sourcing technology solutions; and practice notes for executives moving in this direction. TalentNet is a pure-play, purpose-built technology solution provider that has pursued its own differentiation direction, as we will discuss. 

This Vendor Analysis takes a closer look at TalentNet, providing an overall understanding of the company and its solution, a summary assessment of features and functions, a company SWOT analysis, and a selection checklist for companies that might consider TalentNet.

Fiverr International Ltd., the online freelance services marketplace, announced the launch of Fiverr Business. The new subscription-based solution provides a way for larger, buy-side organizations to engage and work with freelancers. As such, it is a step up-market for Fiverr and a way to respond to a market adopting remote work models amid the coronavirus disruption.

This Spend Matters PRO Vendor Introduction offers a candid take on Renhead and its capabilities that help companies (and their MSPs) manage their sourcing of both contingent and permanent workers. The brief includes an overview of Renhead and its solution offerings, a summary solution evaluation, a SWOT analysis and, lastly, a tech selection checklist for companies that might consider the provider.

Welcome to the September 2020 edition of Spend Matters Insiders’ Hot List, a monthly look at the contingent workforce and services (CW/S) space. For those new to the Hot List, each edition covers the prior month’s important or interesting technology and innovation developments in the CW/S space.

In the last Hot List, we covered key events and developments that took place in July 2020, including the launch of the SAP Fieldglass External Talent Marketplace, service procurement solution Medpricer becoming Conductiv, Wazoku acquiring Innocentive, and developments in the emerging group of “neobanks” serving freelancers and small providers.

So, was August a hot month? Temperatures were high, certainly in the U.S. But in terms of new developments and innovation in the CW/S space, the heat and the beat goes on in both the northern and southern hemispheres. So let’s check out the hotspots.