Zycus’ annual user conference, Horizon 2013,  is in the books, starting this past Sunday and ending Tuesday afternoon. Offering a blend of thought leadership, customer case studies, company vision, and a celebrity keynote. Zycus’ second annual conference was another strong showing that builds upon the successes of last year’s event (which we covered here). Zycus is an India-based supply management solution provider offering a suite of solutions that support the source-to-pay process and a host of data, performance, and information management needs.

Zycus Vision

Zycus’ CEO Aatish Dedhia kicked off Day One with a presentation entitled “Zycus Vision.” Aatish, as usual, was direct and to the point in his presentation, providing some context around his company’s approach to the market and its product strategy. Aatish firmly believes that these elements will “enable Zycus to deliver maximum ROI to its customers and be the most innovative provider of procurement technology solutions worldwide.”

With its legacy in spend analysis, auto-classification, and the management of data and information, Zycus remains competitive and well-positioned in the strategic sourcing solutions market. And, with the addition of new P2P applications in recent years, Zycus can now support many companies’ full source-to-pay technology needs. In building out its core cloud-based suite, Zycus is following the same approach to solution development that Ariba did when it broadened its suite (albeit from a very different starting point) and worked to get its solutions all onto the same ‘stack’ to ensure the integrity and flow of data and processes across its suite.

Aatish sees several market forces that he believes will create an environment that Zycus can exploit to achieve its bold goals.

1. The growing preference of procurement departments to adopt suites of technology instead of taking an application-centric approach. Aatish sees the growth of strategic sourcing and P2P suite deals eventually creating a market where full source-to-pay deals are the standard.
2. Aatish believes that SAP’s acquisition of Ariba has created a void in the market and that many companies will seek alternatives to the ERP providers.
3. Growing feature parity in the market.
4. Price affordability for solutions and the constant downward pressure on pricing in this market.
5. The value of integration with common data flows, master data, and analytics.

Since market forces alone won’t win the day for Zycus, Aatish also laid out what he believes Zycus is doing to advance in the market. In general, he believes that Zycus’ focus on customer needs will carry them far and is focused on four primary areas.

1. Comprehensiveness (of offering)  – Beyond source-to-pay, Zycus also offers a series of solutions designed to improve performance and data/information management. Additionally, Zycus demoed its new ‘One View’ capability which will be rolled out in a product release later this year.  One View is a new capability that pulls all data from the different applications into a single dashboard.
2. Ease of use – this has been the central component to Zycus’ solution and go-to-market strategy for several years. Aatish offered Zycus’ upcoming mobile launch as continued evidence of its commitment to usability.
3. Responsiveness (to customer needs) – Aatish says that Zycus has a focus on customer ROI and works with its clients in a variety of ways to help them maximize their returns.
4. Sustainability (of technology vendors) – Aatish committed to the audience that it will remain an independent company and said that with no outside investors, there is no pressure to sell the company.

Aatish’s vision for Zycus is bold, so realizing it will be no slam dunk. And, while Zycus’ strengths in spend/supplier/master data management provide a strong foundation for its solutions in an increasingly data-driven world, its success in building out its P2P suite and the development of a network strategy (or alternative) may ultimately determine how far it goes.

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Tagged in: P2P, Solution Providers, Source-to-Settle, Sourcing