Earlier this year, we initiated the first of our planned 20 for 2020 series’ as an echo to the 10 for 2010 series that we used to launch this site. That first 2020 series focused on the key themes and ideas that Chief Procurement Officers should have on their agenda this decade. This second series focuses on “Key Providers in 2020” which you can think of as (borrowing from Supply and Demand Chain Executive and countless others), the 20 “Solution Providers to Know” this year and this decade. We continue today with Ivalua.
Key Provider in the 2020s – Ivalua
Founded in 2000, Ivalua is a global provider of a complete, unified spend management platform that includes Supplier Management, eSourcing, Contract Management, eProcurement, eInvoicing and ePayments solutions as well as a spend analysis and reporting offering. A global firm that began in France, Ivalua now has over 600 employees working out of 17 offices in 70 countries and has headquarters in Redwood City, California and Paris, France. New offices for 2019 included Washington DC, Malmo, Dubai, and Sydney. With the 2019 opening of its Sydney office, Ivalua now has offices on all six continents.
Ivalua currently manages more than $500 billion in annual spend for its 300+ global customers. The company has been on a winning streak the past few years and 2019 was no different as it reported adding more than 50 new customers on top of record revenues (approaching $100MM, a 32% year-over year increase) while also boasting a customer retention rate greater than 98% for 2019. The company raised an additional $60MM and made a significant increase in its R&D. Today, the company has a vibrant technology partner ecosystem that extends its native capabilities and a very long list of SI partners to deploy its solutions (Ivalua’s preferred deployment approach is for its SI partners to drive the majority of work, while it remains involved enough in the projects to ensure that its expertise is fully-accessed).
“All Spend, All Suppliers, No Compromise”
Ivalua takes the view that just as ERPs function primarily as a finance platform, it functions as a true supplier platform, capable of supporting any and all supplier transactions, collaborations, spend, etc. With a tag line “ALL Spend, ALL Suppliers, No Compromise” Ivalua has gone all-in on its ability to deliver a comprehensive, unified solution suite that covers the full Source-to-Pay footprint with a set of applications that share a common data model, use a single sign-on, offer a standard user experience including workflow and reporting. Ivalua argues that it is possible to deliver a suite of ‘best-of-breed” solutions such that its customers gain the benefit of using an integrated suite without any trade off in feature/functionality and offers an impressive list of customers using just its strategic sourcing solutions or just its P2P solutions and many more who have adopted the full suite. Additionally, Ivalua’s acquisition of Directworks and subsequent build-out of its upstream and downstream capabilities enables it to provide robust direct materials sourcing, including a new bid optimization engine and direct materials order management in a much more comprehensive way than most of its competitors.
A Flexible Supplier Platform
For many years, Ivalua’s approach stood in contrast to the idea that plain-vanilla cloud deployments should be the default approach, but rather that procurement teams can get more value from their solutions when their best practices are enabled within the solutions that they use. For years, unique requirements were deployed by Ivalua at the customer level. But, more recently, the company has introduced a series of vertical-specific, prepackaged solutions that capture unique industry requirements and tailored best practices. Manufacturing, health care, financial services, and public sector are currently supported with a fifth industry offering to be announced soon. For example, the way that a health care system purchases and uses high-cost supplies in support of patient care can have multiple layers of complexity that far outstrip a standard purchase order and receiving process; Ivalua’s health care vertical solution contemplates these and other standard industry use cases and builds them into the core product. Similar examples that manage unique and highly-complex workflows, challenging organizational structures and many other unique add-ons and integrations are also embedded in these vertical offerings as well.
Innovation
Ivalua’s growth and retention numbers clearly indicate that it has done and continues to do many things right in the broader market related to its core solutions and general approach. But, the company is also focused on innovation, and with several rounds of funding, has had the focus and funding to build an ‘intelligence layer’ across the full platform. This includes various types of AI technologies to improve user decision-making with better intelligence, automate more manual tasks, and provide more and better ways to access and use the technology. One big area of innovation is its new integrated virtual assistant or “IVA,” which functions as a chat-based (and voice-enabled) assistant that has a variety of skills or capabilities that enable users to perform a variety of tasks in a more fluid and engaging way. For example, IVA enables guided workflows for requisitioning and contract authoring but, it also supports spend reports and analytics via a natural language voice query. To do so, a user can ask about a specific supplier’s spend by category and/or within a certain time frame (and potentially other spend dimensions) and the system will present the appropriate data and reports which the user can then analyze or modify or make an additional language request change.
The company has also introduced many new features in its latest 2020 release including optimization-based sourcing capabilities, a network/visibility tool that enables buyers to develop and view multi-tiers into their supply chain, enhanced UX and search capabilities in P2P, and a series on enhancements related to supplier collaboration and invoice automation.
From its early days as a regional, eProcurement innovator, Ivalua has evolved into a primary player in the procurement and supply management technology arena with a broad and robust suite and a thriving customer base and ecosystem around it. And, with solid backing and a focus on innovation, Ivalua is one of the few companies that stands poised to challenge the big two providers in the space across the full spectrum, and is one of Ardent Partners’ Key Providers in the 2020s.
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