When we last covered Vinimaya, the B2B Search Engine, back in 2008, they were the next wave in product catalogue management. Remembering that Networks are ok. Catalogs are Good. Punch-outs are Better. But Agents are King!, we noted that Vinimaya was the first solution that did real-time federated search across all of your supplier databases, catalogues, and punch-outs through a single consumer-like search and shop interface.

And, unlike other procurement enablement solutions of the day, a buyer could be up and running in a day with all suppliers that provided formatted catalogues, standard punch-outs, or industry standard APIs and the majority of remaining suppliers could be brought on with about one day’s worth of effort due to their extensively configurable agent architecture specially designed to integrate with punch-outs, catalogues, EDI, XML, marketplaces, and industry standard database APIs. And even the 25% of suppliers that did not fall into the quick enable category could typically be enabled in 3 to 5 days.

The solution was the first to give the buyer total control over access, view, and pricing with their local pricing and audit engine capabilities. Marketplace pricing could be over-riden with contract pricing if and when required. And the platform worked beautifully. In 2008, their five largest implementations supported over 30K users and allowed hundreds of suppliers to be searched simultaneously through one federated view.

But Vinimaya didn’t stand still. While they may have had a brief hiccup on the marketing side during 2009 – 2011 due to management changes and the relocation of corporate headquarters, product development kept on trucking and since then have built a large number of new and impressive features and capabilities on top of the industry leading procurement marketplace technology that Vinimaya built between 2003 and 2009. (One has to remember that Vinimaya was the first vendor with [patented] federated search back in 2003, the first “simple search” of all content sources, the first forced ranking solution for products and searches across all content sources, and the first to offer real-time audit of pricing across punch-out supplier search results. In addition, it is now the first solution SI has seen that offers universal search results and shopping from within your ERP e-Procurement solution.)

On top of their base platform, that supported content management, federated search, powerful connectivity options, personalization and customization, globalization, and an easy to use shopping cart with authentication and single sign on, user roles and permission, Vinimaya has added (more extensive) auditing capability, workflow-based catalog management, quick-quote (RFX) capability, e-Forms, deep analytics capability, mobile capabilities, and social integration as well as a new transport framework for managing Purchase Orders and Invoices. In the posts that follow, we’ll dive deeper into these new capabilities and the strides Vinimaya has made over the last four years.