While it might not be easy to look at the non-subscriber / non-client prices of a Gartner and Hackett research report or the cost of an annual subscription and say “yeah, it’s worth it“, we’d like to remind you that you get what you pay for and when you pay for cut-rate advice from a generic Indian Research Firm staffed by people who clearly don’t know anything about the Procurement Market and who hire PR people who think it’s a good idea to push their press releases to a website that got its name from a misspelling of Sheldon Cooper’s catch-phrase (from the Big Bang Theory), you’re paying for advice that, if followed, will cost you many times more than what you paid for that “research” when you follow the advice and make disasterous decisions.

So what kicked off this rant? This ridiculous press release on Benzinga.com by 360 Market Updates on the e-Procurement Tools Market that proclaims to know How the Market will Witness Substantial Growth in the upcoming years. Research over the last decade from Hackett, Gartner, and Spend Matters — where the doctor was a Lead Analyst for six (6) years — have consistently found, and predicted, year over year growth in the 8 to 12% range, at best, across all areas of Source to Pay, a rate that’s no better the consistent predictions of about 11% CAGR for the broader enterprise software market for the current decade, and in some cases worse.

In other words, while steady, consistent growth is expected, it’s not substantial growth under any interpretation and it’s on par with enterprise software as a whole, at best.

But even worse, it’s apparently based on a completely random, entirely mismatched, set of “e-Procurement Tool Vendors” which demonstrates ZERO understanding of the global Procurement Tools market.

First of all, if you include all of the Procure-to-Pay vendors, there are over 100. SI has listed the majority of them in Parts 7 and 33 of it’s 39 Part Series on where to start with Source-to-Pay where it listed over 70 e-Procurement companies and over 75 Invoice-to-Pay and Accounts Payable companies. Their press release only lists 15 companies but …

… doesn’t seem to recognize that e-Sourcing, e-Procurement, and Supply Chain Management are not the same thing at all, and one of the vendors included is Delta e-Sourcing whose primary offerings are baseline e-Sourcing/tendering and supplier management and offers only baseline e-Procurement, compared to Medius which offers Procure-to-Pay (Procurement, Invoice Management, and AP Automation). Even worse, it contains Archlet that is an analytics-backed Sourcing Platform with Decision Optimiation and which DOES NOT OFFER ANY e-PROCUREMENT TOOLS.

… isn’t up to date. It lists LetsBuyIt.NET GmbH as one of the 15 vendors (and if you’re saying who?, you’re not alone because it doesn’t exist anymore). LetsBuyIt.Net is now eBidToPay Schweiz, and has been for nine (9) months. (So is this a recycled report from 2022 or 2021?)

… includes a big vendor that doesn’t even sell a Procurement Application anymore! It lists IBM corporation as the first provider, and while IBM acquired Emptoris in 2011, it began to sunset it in 2017 when it worked out an agreement with SAP to migrate all the Emptoris customers to the SAP Ariba platform!

In other words this report, like the rest of the two-dozen plus low-cost reports you can buy from the two-dozen plus Indian Market Research firms that have popped up over the last two decades, is more-or-less complete rubbish and you’d be better off taking that $6K and sending two of your top buyers to a major Procurement event where they can hear from experts, network with peers, and learn something actually valuable.

And if you need REAL market insight into current vendors and their platform capabilities, and the Gartner/Hackett reports don’t meet your needs, you can always go direct to the experts (like the doctor or Xavier and Bertrand^* at Spend Matters, who the doctor has publicly recommended in his list of analysts and consultants he recommends when he’s not the best expert to help you). Yes, you may have to pay a few K per day, but you get targeted advice to your organization which is worth ten times (or more) what you pay because it’s based on decades of research and experience that allows the analyst/consultant to give you the best targetted advice for your organization while filtering out the market information that is relevant to you.

^* Bertrand could be the last great analyst in our space! Take advantage of this while you still can … after all, it’s not the analyst firm. It’s the analyst!