This week’s SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews of Tradeshift, which is known for its marketplace service, global invoice processing, payment capabilities and financing support. Tradeshift’s applicable SolutionMap categories for this report are in E-Procurement, Invoice-to-Pay and Procure-to-Pay.
Doing better government market research is the latest topic from Public Spend Forum that we’ll address in Spend Matters’ weekly look at public sector procurement. PSF, a sister site of ours, has published articles addressing four of the seven steps for better government market research. It also offers free tools and templates that you can use to improve your market and supplier research outcomes. Let’s look at the full list and then delve into the details on the first four steps.
Fiverr (NYSE: FVRR), the online marketplace for digital creative services, priced its 5.3 million IPO shares Wednesday night at $21 per, raising about $111 million in new funding. On Thursday morning, shares began trading at $26, but when the market closed in the afternoon, Fiverr’s share price had risen to $39.96 (nearly doubling). Based on the closing price per share and an estimated 31 million shares outstanding, Fiverr’s market cap would be about $1.2 billion, or 16 times revenue.
We will provide further analytic post-IPO coverage soon. In the meantime, check out our recent PRO series: Fiverr, the Online Services Marketplace, Is Going Public: What You Need to Know — Part 1 and Part 2.
This week’s vendor spotlight in the SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews of the source-to-pay suite provider Zycus, whose applicable SolutionMap categories for this report are in Source-to-Pay, Procure-to-Pay and Strategic Procurement Technologies.
SolutionMap Insider members can click here to read about Zycus in our latest report.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of qualitative — and select rating and quantitative — insights from the SolutionMap peer review process. The Customer Insights summary includes ratings on how well the vendor meets user expectations, three key differentiators for the vendor and a list of quotes about the vendor’s greatest strengths.
This two-part Spend Matters PRO series examines the online services platform provider Fiverr, which recently announced that it is going public (presumptively this month). The company — which has brought a fresh, distinct approach to the business market for freelancer-driven, platform-based work/services — will become the next business in the category to IPO after Freelancer.com (ASX: FLN) in 2013 and Upwork (NASDAQ: UPWK) in 2018.
Becoming a public company can be accompanied by opportunities for business validation, market awareness, access to capital, etc., but it brings new responsibilities, transparency and challenges (especially in a market that — despite getting kicked off in the mid-2000s — is still immature and evolving). Do these IPOs mark the start of a new stage of market development when businesses of all sizes may begin to accommodate and scale their new workforce models? If so, what do procurement practitioners and senior business executives know about Fiverr and the market that it and other work/services platforms operate in?
In Part 1, we examined Fiverr as an online work/services platform business (background, go-to-market strategy, solution offering and financial picture).
In Part 2, we will look at Fiverr in a broader industry context and provide a high-level comparison to Freelancer.com and Upwork. We also offer insights for procurement practitioners and executive leadership in larger organizations who are trying to get a handle on the potential supply channel of online/remote, freelancer-based work/services platforms.
Private equity — and other — buyout and M&A interest in the procurement solutions market is at an all-time high. We define procurement solutions as technologies and services that target a range of areas that include:
— Core procurement (i.e., source-to-pay, procure-to-pay, etc.)
— Direct procurement
— Services procurement
— Contract management (that goes beyond supplier contracts)
— Accounts payable
— Trade financing (B2B Fintech)
— B2B (transactional connectivity, marketplaces, aggregation and GPO models)
— Third-party (supplier) management from a GRC standpoint as much as from a procurement standpoint
This multi-part Spend Matters PRO research brief explores the “who” (i.e., what types of companies are attracting the most interest and the profile of different buyers), the “why” (i.e, typical investment theses) and the “how” (i.e., the mechanics of deal processes and what is unique to the solution area, including where buyers that are new to the sector often have a higher learning curve than expected). It also explores some important dynamics in the market that have changed in recent months as buyer interest from both the strategic and financial sides increases.
Today we begin by exploring the “who” by segmenting the types of targets that are garnering the most attention into 10 areas and exploring the first five in detail (procurement technology suites, transaction-focused solutions, payment/financing providers, nimble solutions and leveraged buying / GPO models), including sharing illustrative providers in each segment and why buyers are attracted to each group.
* Our parent company, Azul Partners, has directly advised on more than half a dozen transactions in recent quarters, primarily working in a due diligence and strategy capacity for both strategic and financial buyers, leveraging our proprietary SolutionMap benchmark database, customer satisfaction/peer review benchmarks, PRO research, SolutionMap Insider research, and deep domain knowledge. Azul Partners works with investors in two ways. First, we partner with clients as exclusively retained subject matter experts in these markets. Second, we serve as an “arms dealers,” providing subscription research to hundreds of clients.
This week’s vendor spotlight in the SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews of the suite provider Oracle, which we rank in the areas of e-procurement, invoice-to-pay and procure-to-pay.
SolutionMap Insider members can click here to read about Oracle in our latest report.
In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of insights from the SolutionMap peer review process. The Customer Insights summary includes ratings on how well the vendor meets user expectations, three key differentiators for the vendor and a list of quotes about the vendor’s greatest strengths.
Spend Matters’ analysts have been writing personal essays on their favorite SolutionMap personas: Nimble, Deep, Turn-Key, Configurator, CIO Friendly as well as Optimizer for sourcing providers and Global for CWS vendors. The personas help companies select which solution provider is right for them. This week’s essay is by Michael Lamoureux, our lead analyst for strategic procurement technologies and a futurist.
My favorite persona is the one we don't publish — the whole nine yards, which is basically the raw Solution Map with every single requirement evaluated and weighted full. It's a persona that almost no vendor would do well in, so why is it my favorite? Because it gets to the heart of what the vendor can't do and what its limits are.
Welcome to the June 2019 edition of Spend Matters Insider’s Hot List, a monthly look at the contingent workforce and services (CW/S) space that’s available to PLUS and PRO subscribers. 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. Uber, Deliveroo, Doordash and Fiverr are among the companies making news.
This week’s vendor spotlight in the SolutionMap Customer Insights report focuses on customer reviews of the suite provider Basware. In each Customer Insights report, we provide a one-page summary of qualitative and quantitative insights from the SolutionMap peer review process. The Customer Insights summary includes ratings on how well the vendor meets user expectations, three key differentiators for the vendor and a list of quotes about the vendor’s greatest strengths.
The mutual insurance firm FM Global this week released its 2019 Resilience Index, examining economic indicators, risk factors and supply chain issues in 130 countries around the world — ranking the nations by the resilience of their business environments. The index is meant to be a tool for senior executives to conduct “vulnerability assessments and build their companies’ resilience around the world,” according to FM Global, which focuses on property loss issues. Norway topped the list, and Haiti came in last. Read on to find out about the U.S., China and Russia.
Late in April, SAP announced that it was bringing its procurement assets under a single operating umbrella. The announcement of the new business unit, tucked into the body of a press release with the headline of a leadership promotion, notes that the “SAP Intelligent Spend Group” will be “comprised of SAP Ariba, SAP Fieldglass and SAP Concur.” The group, according to the announcement, would be headed by SAP Ariba and Concur veteran Barry Padgett, but this week we learned that Padgett left SAP. Regardless of leadership, the Intelligent Spend Group will move forward. This Spend Matters PRO brief provides an analysis of what the creation of a single organization within SAP for these solutions may mean for each individual solution line and customers.