Ivalua held its second annual Ivalua Now customer conference last week in New York City. Ivalua was founded in 2000 and offers an end-to-end suite of spend management solutions. The company, which was founded in France, previously held a biennial user conference in Paris (here is our coverage of those prior events iValua On Air 2013 and Ivalua On Air 2015). The company has since shifted its sights and significant resources to the U.S. The results of that shift are starting to show. The company estimates that last week’s conference brought more than 200 customers, staff, partners, and analysts together for the customer conference held on Day 2 (Day 1 was a dedicated customer-only training workshop). Notable customer presentations at the conference included New York City, Sprint, Whirlpool, and Fannie Mae.
Ivalua Updates
The conference began with a series of updates delivered by Ivalua’s executive team, but primarily its Corporate CEO and Founder, David Khuat-Duy. From a sales and growth perspective, David told us that 2016 was a great year for Ivalua with 35 new customers, 150 “go-live” solution launches, and 100% customer retention. New customers in 2016 included names like Honeywell, Sprint, Credit Suisse, and Swissport. Revenues grew by 45% and were approximately $35 million for the year, with the U.S. accounting for half of all revenue. This indicates that the move into the U.S. a few years ago by the company is starting to pay off. David also noted that the company is building on its success in EMEA and the U.S. and is expanding into Asia. He expects that 2017 will also be a good year for Ivalua and predicts total revenues around $50 million. David noted that the company is not interested in growth for growth’s sake, but to grow at a sustainable pace that also ensures reinvestment in the company and its solutions.
Next David presented the seven key components of his company’s “DNA”:
- The company is focused on the Large Enterprise market, not SMB
- Their goal is to organically build a full suite of solutions dedicated to serving procurement
- Investments in the technology platform are done to offer customers flexibility in the configuration and design of their systems
- Cloud standards will be kept at the highest level
- Achieve growth and profitability at the same time
- They partner with their customers for the long-term
- They will continue to build a strong company culture that drives employee loyalty
David was then followed on stage by the company’s US CEO, Dan Amzallag, who gave a U.S. market specific update and shared their overall growth strategy. A major push for Ivalua in 2017 is the development of more robust customer support programs, including a new “customer success team” with quarterly meetings and expanded customer support offerings. Ivalua is also investing in its customer community with more events and community-building activities which they feel is important to establish as they grow and expand geographically. Dan also discussed a focus on expanding its partner ecosystem through a variety of new programs.
The discussion shifted back to the solutions and David re-took the stage to talk about the recent past and plans for the future. “Innovation around the product is a top priority,” he said and then shared the three components of that strategy – (1) delivering a full suite (2) the power of the platform and (3) being cloud certified with an ability to guarantee data localization.
Looking forward, David says they plan to move into direct materials, services procurement, asset and tooling, T&E, and projects. The goal he said is for “Ivalua to be the system for all spend, all procurement processes, and all roles.” And, with no supplier fees, he quickly added. David’s presentation continued and highlighted recent product innovations across a number of areas, including the user experience, industry-specific capabilities, and enhanced reporting and graphics, as well as a fairly lengthy product road map.
Final Thoughts
We’ve been tracking Ivalua for more than twelve years and, in that time, the company has evolved from a small provider of eProcurement solutions that was very competitive in its home country, but not seen elsewhere to a fast-growing, global provider of a full cloud-based suite of solutions. We noticed this shift a few years ago when we named it a hot tech prospect in 2014. In particular, I was pleased to see the company focus in on large enterprises, a market where it is not necessarily well-known but one in which we believe it can compete.
At the end of the event, Miami was mentioned as a possible location for next year. I vote for Paris.
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