Horizon 2014: Zycus Delivers

Zycus’ 3rd annual user conference, Horizon, was held this week at the Ritz-Carlton in (on?) Amelia Island, Florida, starting this past Sunday and continuing through Tuesday afternoon. The event was Zycus’ largest conference yet and was, by all accounts including mine, a success. The event drew Zycus’ customers from around the world as well as a few analysts, sponsors, and thought-leaders and delivered a blend of customer case studies, best practices, customer recognition and awards, and a celebrity keynote (Captain Phillips of Captain Phillips fame). I participated as a presenter, panel moderator, and awards judge. As is Zycus’ want, the event was decidedly low-key when it comes to the general sales and marketing of Zycus solutions. As is also Zycus’ want, the event offered a very warn and relaxed environment with fun social outlets for the attendees.

I’ll be following up on the event with a series of articles that begins tomorrow, so stay tuned.

Deem Launches its “New” Deem Spend Suite Based on the Ketera Platform

Deem, a provider of cloud-based B2B commerce solutions, announced on November 5 the launch of Deem Spend, a software suite that automates the sourcing process – with automated spend analysis, sourcing, and contract solutions – as well as the supplier enablement process. Deem’s name is a newer one to the pages and to many in the procurement world (Deem was previously known as Rearden Commerce) however the relaunched in this announcement are not. In point of fact, the newest offering was borne out of Deem’s 2010 acquisition of Ketera, a cloud-based provider of a supply management suite. Ketera, as many may recall, was one of the earliest cloud-based providers in the space, best-known for its eProcurement and supplier enablement solutions. While the team has been fairly quiet in the market since the acquisition, Deem has rebranded and updated the Ketera solution, re-releasing it with this announcement as Deem Spend and combining them with Deem’s broader cloud-based platform which has long focused on travel and expense management.

As noted above, Deem Spend features four applications that seek to deliver cost-savings and value to the procurement organization: Deem Spend Analytics for cleaning spend data, an eSourcing tool called Deem Sourcing, Deem Contract Management, and Deem Supplier Enablement.

We’re excited to welcome this provider back to the market and have plans to meet with the executive team to get a detailed update on the solutions and the company’s direction and plans for now and 2015. We’ll report back as appropriate.

Selectica Reports Q2 ’15 Earnings, Wins, and Progress

After the market closed this past Tuesday (11/11/14), Selectica announced its Q2 FY 2015 earnings on a conference call led by Blaine Mathieu, Selectica’s President and Chief Executive Officer and Todd Spartz, its Chief Financial Officer. Selectica is a provider of contract management solutions and acquired strategic sourcing suite provider Iasta earlier this year (click to read our coverage of that acquisition). Anyway, we listened in and here are a few quick highlights:

• Selectica reported GAAP revenues for the quarter of $5.2 million an increase of 32% year-over-year although much of that growth can be attributed to the Iasta acquisition.
• The quarter marked the first true cross-sell contract with Kroger (an Iasta customer) agreeing to sign on with the Selectica CLM solution. Blaine feels that this deal is an early indicator of things to come and stated, “We have many other cross-sell opportunities in the hopper right now with either selling sourcing into Selectica’s client base or ECLM into Iasta’s client base. And many of those will play out over the next two or three quarters. We were excited that Kroger was willing to move quite quickly.”
• The Selectica executives report that the post-merger integration is “on track” including their plans to combine the commercial operations of the two companies into a single unit. Says Blaine agin “We now have one single sales team, an integrated marketing team, one support team and a product team driving towards the future roadmap together.”

For those interested, the earnings announcement can be found here. A recording of the call will presumably be available within the next few days.

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