Sourcing Innovation is pleased to welcome Vinimaya, an innovative provider of e-procurement catalog and marketplace solutions, as its newest lead sponsor. Vinimaya, which represents The Next Wave in Product Catalogue Management (PCM), has been adding new functions, new offerings, and new clients since I first blogged about them back in 2007 (shortly after they were named a Cool Vendor by Gartner).

Unlike other providers, who only support catalogs, marketplaces, punch-out, or punch-out 2.0 (where the vendor maintains a cached copy of the supplier catalogs to simulate simultaneous searching and comparison of supplier products), Vinimaya‘s Virtual Internet Supplier Network solution (VISN, as in “vision”), supports simultaneous, or federated search directly from whatever catalog format your suppliers have in place — be it punch-out, on-line catalog, storefront, marketplace, database, or flat-file. Whereas most solutions force your supplier to adapt to the vendor’s format, Vinimaya‘s agent-based architecture adapts to your suppliers, which is why it’s a low-cost solution for you and for them.

The proof that Vinimaya‘s offering, which revolves around their SmartSearch Catalog software product, actually works is in the adoption level. Vinimaya‘s client base, which includes mostly well-known, brand name, global companies from almost every vertical market, have executed over $1 Billion in online orders over the past 12 months alone. Delivered SaaS with the ability to “plug and play” with just about any e-Procurement system (e.g. SAP, Ariba, Oracle, Peoplesoft, etc.), once installed, the system not only allows you to find the product you need simply and efficiently, but also verifies that you’re paying at the contracted rates. Vinimaya‘s clients sit back and watch their negotiated savings materialize with every purchase.

SmartSearch Catalog also comes with a number of unique features that enhance your efficiency and savings. The unique features include true side-by-side comparison shopping across suppliers, price audit (which will alert you whenever a price has changed or diverged from the contract price), supplier self-service catalog management (which allows your suppliers without any online capabilities to either maintain a catalog for you or create a punch-out site), and inventory checking (which checks that the item is in inventory before sending the order to the supplier). It even offers some capabilities specific to certain procurement systems (e.g. SAP Item Master Check). In the coming weeks, I plan to review the new version of the SmartSearch Catalog (a.k.a. the B2B Search Engine), as well as some of their new offerings, and if I can track down the Sourcing Maniacs, see if they have any insights from their last site visit.

Vinimaya‘s bent toward innovation is no surprise when you look at the management team. CEO Gary Hare, who recently penned a piece on B2B e-Commerce right here on this blog, Orville Bailey and Richard Waugh have been thought leaders in the e-procurement space since its inception.

So please join me in welcoming Vinimaya. It’s innovative companies like them that keep this blog going.