CPO Rising’s Technology Round-Up returns today with an assortment of supply management technology news and updates from the past month to share with our community. If you are a sourcing, procurement, or spend management solution provider and you are continually innovating the way that procurement and supply chain leaders and practitioners drive value, we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a note at editor at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!

Zycus Seeks to Go Beyond Digitalization at Horizon 2019 User Conference

Zycus, a New Jersey-based provider of suite-based and standalone source-to-settle solutions, has been holding its annual Zycus Horizon user conference at the Belmond Charleston Place in Charleston, South Carolina. Ardent’s Founder and Chief Research Officer, Andrew Bartolini, is speaking at the event, joining other industry analysts, tech futurists, and thought leaders, with an an estimated 200 users in attendance. The theme of Horizon 2019 has been Beyond Digitalization: The Dawn of Autonomous Procurement, reflecting Zycus’s push to bring artificial intelligence (AI) to the procurement solutions space. It’s a subject we’ve covered previously on CPO Rising, most recently after Senior Research Analyst, Matthew York, attended Zycus’s analyst day event earlier this summer. Look forward to Andrew’s write-up of the event, which is sure to be chock-full of insight into how Zycus continues to build AI into its suite of source-to-settle solutions for the procurement industry.

SAP Ariba Links the Ariba Network to Swisscom’s Conextrade

Late last month, SAP Ariba, the Palo Alto, California-based provider of source-to-settle business software and networks, announced an integration partnership with Swisscom, one of Switzerland’s largest telecommunications providers. SAP Ariba is linking the Ariba Network with Conextrade, Swisscom’s procurement platform, to expand the reach of each platform into new industries and countries while maintaining industry- and country-specific compliance and security protocols. Buyers and suppliers on both networks will have access to each network and each other without having to fully migrate to one or the other. Buyers and suppliers will be able to reach new trading partners in either network but conduct processes and transactions within their native networks. They will also be able to leverage shareable data from each network that, for compliance reasons, will remain in each network. This will enable users to take advantage of the community intelligence effect that SAP Ariba has been trying to foster as more trading partners leverage the Ariba Network, which is meant to provide more predictive outcomes for users.

Fairmarkit Raises $11 million in Series A Funding

Boston-based Fairmarkit, which provides automated procurement and spend management solutions that focus on tail spend, announced late last month that it has received $11 million in Series A financing from Insight Partners and Fairmarkit’s seed investors. Fairmarkit applies machine-learning algorithms to automate the sourcing and procurement of the approximately 80% of an enterprise’s purchases that are tactical in nature and or fall below a certain threshold (i.e., tail spend), and pull that spend under procurement’s influence or management. Fairmarkit will use its new source of funding to expand its staff (product development, marketing, and customer success), expand its suite of procurement solutions (with help from its newly-established Customer Advisory Board), and further integrate AI into its platform. Insight Partners’ Vice President, Thomas Krane, and Co-founder and COO, Tarek Alaruri, will also join the company’s Board of Directors as a result of the investment.

Xeeva, Agiloft Partner, Integrate Contracting and Source-to-Settle Tools

Also late last month, Xeeva, the Michigan-based provider of sourcing and procurement solutions, and Agiloft, a California-based provider of contract management solutions, announced that they have partnered with each other to provide customers with an integrated source-to-contract solution. The two companies already position themselves as industry leaders in the application and development of AI-enabled supply management solutions. Together, they intend to provide users with the ability to access each other’s business tools from their native platforms and in effect create an integrated and intelligent — if not unified — array of sourcing, contracting, procurement, payment, and analytic tools.

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