It’s only our second “Tech Round-up” and already, I’m thinking that we may need to rename this series – too generic.
Anyway, as a reminder, this month, CPO Rising started publishing articles on a daily (weekday) basis. Besides allowing us to share 40% more of what we view as the highest quality research and analysis in the market today, moving to a daily schedule will also allow us to expand our coverage (slowly, but surely) of the technology landscape and the solution providers within it.
A large, albeit less visible, part of the work that Ardent does is focused on the supply management technology landscape, so publishing articles like today’s “Technology Round-up,” is very much aligned with our expertise/background and our ongoing research and advisory business. Accordingly, if you are not already, solution providers are encouraged to engage us for briefings and with press releases by emailing me and/or the email address “editor @ this site dot com” Stories and briefings of interest will be considered for publication.
Today’s round-up brings us news from Paris (Ivalua – via a briefing), Tampa (IBM-Emptoris via the IBM Smarter Commerce Global Summit), and San Francisco (Coupa – via an announcement).
Ivalua On Air and On US Soil
When I last met with the Ivalua team at their user conference last fall (click the link to see my analysis of the conference), there were good indications that 2013 was shaping up to be a banner year for the company. The main stage presentation by “friend of the site,” Blaine Hurley, Senior Director, Sourcing Excellence within the Global Strategic Sourcing group in Whirlpool (click here to see our coverage of Blaine’s presentation) was a strong indication that Ivalua was having a banner year in the U.S.
Those growth indications were confirmed in a briefing conducted this past month in Boston with iValua’s Chief Marketing Officer, Gérard Dahan and Paul Noel, Ivalua’s SVP of Procurement Solutions who both reported that iValua’s revenue was up 50% year-over-year in 2013 and that sales in that same time frame increased by almost 400%. While Ivalua’s 2012 sales and revenue numbers were not huge, per se, this level of growth is impressive, nonetheless. Ivalua is a provider of a supply management solution suite that includes Purchasing Intelligence (or Spend Analysis), eSourcing, Contracts & Catalogs, Expense Reports, Supplier Information Management, and a set of Procure-to-Pay (eProcurement and eInvoicing) solutions. Over the years, Ivalua has proven itself and its mature suite with many large, complex deployments at huge multinationals like EDF, Orange, Valeo, and Thales (all huge corporations that are not particularly well known in the U.S.), but it was only very recently that Ivalua decided to enter the U.S. market.
While Ivalua’s sales in Europe, (its most mature market) impressively doubled in 2013, it was Ivalua’s sales success in the US that went from next to nothing to tens of millions in a single year that really excites Ivalua’s leadership. And, with highly-competitive wins at Fannie Mae and Select Medical Corp as well as deals at Whirlpool, AIMCO, and with several public agencies in Canada, Ivalua is on a winning streak that it believes can extend well beyond 2014.
Ivalua’s been “On Air” in France for many years, but they arrived more forcefully in 2013 and should now be “On the Radar” for those enterprises considering any number of supply management solutions this year.
IBM-Emptoris: Empowered and Smarter
Despite reports from several of its technology partners that the deal flow for IBM-Emptoris was pretty steady in 2013, from our perspective, it has been relatively quiet going for the Emptoris unit since it was acquired by IBM in early 2012. Like few others in this space, Emptoris, has had both an astounding and tumultuous history filled with very high highs and extremely low lows that culminated in some “big green” from the “Big Blue” buy-out after a turnaround by Marlin Equity Partners and its hired hands.
Emptoris calls its annual user conference Emptoris Empower (click here if you’d like to read my analysis of their 2010 conference) and this year, it held its 12th annual Emptoris Empower conference (I’ve attended 7) within IBM’s annual (and gigantic) Smarter Commerce Global Summit held a few weeks ago in Tampa. Empower also served as the “Procurement and Legal” track for the larger conference and included a few main stage presentations and 27 breakout sessions from the Emptoris staff, customers, and partners. More interesting than any of these presentations, from my perspective anyway, was the renewed interest that IBM has taken in the Emptoris suite and its recent and planned investments.
Despite remaining a ‘darling’ of several of the other analyst firms that occasionally rank different solutions (and despite winning a recent RFP that Ardent Partners managed), it was our opinion that the Emptoris suite had grown a little stale over the past few years (this was also a view that was shared by some Emptoris customers directly to us in 2013 and 2014). In the scheme of things, this was perfectly understandable considering Emptoris’ tough years before the turnaround and subsequent buyout and IBM’s more deliberate post-M&A approach to new solutions. Now, however, it appears that the Emptoris unit has the attention of its IBM parent and has launched a recent release with numerous functional and technical enhancements. Near-term plans also include a transformation of the legacy suite into a solution with the look and feel of other IBM software – this should result in a cleaner and more intuitive user interface. While in Tampa, we discussed scheduling a demo and will report back as appropriate.
Coupa’s Inspired Earnings
Earlier this month, Coupa announced its Q1 204 earnings, highlighted by a “more than 100% growth” in revenue as compared to Q1, 2013. Coupa also reported that it had raised an additional $40 million in funding, signed key new partnerships, and expanded its executive team. Some of this news was covered in our write-up of last month’s Coupa Inspire 2014, the company’s annual user conference but, also we’ll address some of the news here.
Coupa also announced a large number of new customer wins in Q1 2014 including Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Associated Materials, Apartment Investment and Management Company, Sandvik AB, Brookdale Senior Living, and Cable and Wireless Caribbean. It also stated that it expanded its relationship with companies like Pandora Media, Groupon, FirstMerit Corporation, and General Atlantic.
Finally, several weeks before its INSPIRE conference, Coupa announced that it had raised $40 million in a new round of funding. Since its founding in 2006, Coupa has historically been successful in using its funding to develop innovative and usable solutions; this has been borne out by the high revenue and customer usage growth rates that it consistently reports. On the heels of INSPIRE, we expect Coupa to maintain its momentum in its current markets for both this year and next.
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