My 2025 conference season kicked off last week with Ivalua Now EMEA. The conference took place in central Paris at the Carrousel De Louvre, a larger venue than last year, which was good considering that the number of attendees (and partners) keeps growing.
Ivalua also keeps expanding organically and added 60 new customers last year while maintaining high customer retention. Ivalua reports $200 million in revenue for 2024, over 1,050 employees, and north of 500 customers. While Ivalua has traditionally worked with large enterprises (over $5 billion in tier 1 revenue), 40% of customers are now in the range of $500 million to $5 billion (tier 2) or even below $500 million (tier 3) usually working through resellers and partners.
Ivalua V10
At this year’s event, there were no big product announcements like last year when both intake management and external workforce management were unveiled. That said, Ivalua V10 was announced. V10 is the new Ivalua platform that is laying the foundation for even more advancements in AI and automation. The new platform capabilities are focused on four themes: accuracy, compliance and security, experience, and agility.
The Future of S2P (according to Ivalua)
Ivalua continued the product session by talking about the future of S2P. According to Ivalua, the future of S2P can be described by five characteristics: intelligent, conversational, holistic, flexible, and connected.
The intelligence section focused on a robust data backbone as well as assistants and autonomous agents. Lots can be said here, but my observations are that the robust data backbone was very focused on supplier data, which is certainly a critical part, but didn’t mention transactional data that is just as important.
The section on conversational was centered around the ability to “chat with your data,” or in other words, retrieve information about your data (including documents such as contracts) using natural language both via text and voice. Ivalua then cheated a bit and bundled up holistic and flexible to discuss intake orchestration (more on that below) as well as deeper capabilities in external workforce management, global tax compliance, and AP automation and payments.
The last section was the connected characteristic. Here, Ivalua talked about added capabilities to connect deeper with third-party systems, various public sector portals, and third-party data providers. The discussion also looked at capabilities on how to extend workflows outside Ivalua to improve stakeholder collaboration, comply with eInvoicing regulations and standards (PDP, Peppol, etc.) and how to collaborate with (or at least track) sub-tier suppliers.
Ivalua Intake Orchestration
By now, no one has missed the hype around what we at Ardent Partners call Intake Management and Procurement Process Orchestration (IM&PPO). Ivalua launched their version last year of IM&PPO, called Ivalua Intake Orchestration, and spent quite a bit of time on it at this year’s conference as well. The main entry point for Ivalua Intake Orchestration is IVA (Ivalua Virtual Assistant), Ivalua’s chatbot interface. It comes with a handful of out-of-the-box use cases (such as supplier intake, sourcing intake, contract intake, and procurement intake). While it currently comes across as internally oriented (i.e., focused on processes completed in Ivalua), Ivalua states that it can be used for any type of request and be integrated with any type of third-party system.
Ivalua — Realistic Innovators
This year’s Ivalua Now EMEA did not offer any mind-blowing innovations. That does not mean that Ivalua is not innovative. It’s more that they are taking a pragmatic and realistic approach. The improvements are made stepwise and meeting customers where they are while at the same time laying the foundation for more revolutionary innovations by focusing on renewing the platform.
Finally, like last year, I can’t not mention the celebration party. This year’s party was held at the gorgeous Opera Garnier and featured both opera singers and ballet dancers, as well as excellent wines and great conversations. Once again, Ivalua put on a great event and I look forward to following up on Ivalua and its continuing journey to cover “all spend, all suppliers.”
A bientot!
