Jason Busch had a great post on Oracle’s new Sourcing on Demand offering on Spend Matters yesterday. Although it was a few paragraphs longer than his average post, and included a laundry list of features, it’s worth a read as it has some insightful information that is hard to come by. (Oracle, like a few other large players in this space, are very selective in who they talk to and, as such, solid information is hard to come by on the independent blogs.)

As I have not had the opportunity to demo the product, I’m not going to do a technical review but I am going to highlight two important take-aways from Jason’s post.

1. The original design of R12 (and MRD), which the new on-demand solution is based on, was written in 2004 and was 3 years in the making before its initial release in 2007.
   This says that while the solution may still be good, don’t expect the latest best-of-breed functionality. It’s not going to be there.
2. The list pricing is $850 per user per month with a minimum of 20 seats (and a set up fee of $5,000)
   Doing the math, that’s a minimum of 17,000 a month or 204,000 a year. That’s likely (at least) twice what you’ll pay for what I consider to be competitive on-demand best-of-breed sourcing solutions, especially in this market. I’m not saying it’s not worth it, but if it doesn’t “fit” snugly into your current platform, the ROI might not be there. Be sure to do a TCO/TVM assessment before making a decision (and consider bringing in an RFP Expert and Deal Architect to help you out).