Category Archives: SaaS

The Real Value of the Sourcing Innovation Mega Map (2026 Ed)

1) It shows you how expansive the space is and why you need proper Assisted Solution Selection:
[Successful Vendor Selection: The Series]

2) It shows you how unstable the space is:
a) Fifty-Four (54) companies are gone.
b) Ten-Plus (10+) have been acquired and/or renamed …
… and could be discontinued / go out of business at any time!
c) for some functions, there are too many options!

a+b) While a disappearance rate of roughly 6% a year is only about 20% higher than normal, it’s just the tip of the iceberg! Right now, the RCD (relative corporate debt) of a majority of vendors is too high and we’re on the cusp of a purge unseen in two decades (that most of you won’t remember). I am still predicting up to 15% disappearance for the next 18 to 24 months between

* mergers/targeted acquisitions so both firms can remain on the cusp of viability
* fire-sale acquisitions to pick up talent and customers
* outright bankruptcies from vendors who aren’t getting funding

because the market is still tight, the software project failure rate is at an all time high (88%, 94% for Gen-AI), and your C-Suite (who got burned last time) is still afraid to give you budget.

Post Edit: Happy to say I’m not alone. See THE PROPHET‘s predictions for the FinTech investment market for 2026:

c) even when you segment by spend-size (not market size), culture (not geography), and industry, you still can’t support more than a few dozen players. In some cases we have 100!

3) It proves that, statistically, there are quite a few vendors that are not good.

[How to Select a Vendor NOT likely to screw you over; Part of
The MOST important clause in your (Procure)Tech (SaaS) Contract Series]

I’m going to remind you again that some estimates put the number of psychopaths in professional positions in NA at 5%, 3 of the 4 top jobs they seek are Salesperson, Lawyer, and CEO … and they are all attracted to the industries with the most money. Right now, that’s FinTech (subsumes ProcureTech).

As many as 1/20 sales people/CEOs don’t care if you get value or not, as long as they get the deal. Especially when the firm took too much money and they have to hit unrealistic sales targets to keep their jobs!

For those of you who believe all founders and all sales people honestly want to deliver value, as a former developer/architect/CTO, I will tell you this: bullsh!t!

Some founders see their peers doing startups and getting rich in 5 years and just want the same. They’re building to sell, not to build long term customer value.

But sales people can be much worse! I have had the displeasure on more than one occasion to work for companies in tech positions where, even after the sales person was expressly told the product didn’t do X, couldn’t do X for Y months/years, and it wasn’t on the roadmap, still told the customer X was available today and they’d have it on initial implementation if they signed the deal now. (These are usually the same salespeople that never seem to stay anywhere too long …)

And here’s our updated Cascading Mega-Map 2026 Edition!

The Sourcing Innovation Source-to-Pay+ Cascading Mega Map! (2026 Edition)

(c) 2025-12-15

Still useless, but still slightly less useless than every other logo map that clogs your feed!

1. Every vendor offering verified as of 4 days ago!

2. Every vendor logo is clickable!

3. Every vendor is mapped to a meaningful category as of the last date of analyst investigation!

So what’s the point?

To again make it utterly clear you can’t select a vendor based on a random grouping of logos on a map, even if they are categorized!

Not even if the map categorizes the vendors by market size, industry, and/or geography. Those are just proxies for organizational spend, solution needs and cultural requirements. And not every mid-market manufacturing plant in the USA is the same.

The only way to select a good vendor is to follow a proper assisted process and engage an expert who understands what vendors are out there to identify the right vendors to invite to the RFP process once your true needs have been identified.

Especially considering the true number of vendors out there is many times more than what an average big analyst firm will tell you, especially when they restrict their recommendations to their paying clients in their maps, and multiples of what an average big consultancy will tell you, that only knows their partner solutions (that they need to maintain significant focus on to maintain their preferred partner status).

So let this be proof that there are a lot of logos and that, if you want logos, you got logos! 666 of them!

Please see the V2 Edition for the actual cascading Mega Map.

Successful Vendor Selection – The Series

Even in a House of Lies there is Truth!

From 2012 to 2016, Showtime ran a series called House of Lies, which was a comedy drama where a charming management consultant and his crack team used every dirty trick in the book to woo powerful CEOs and close huge deals.

And, unlike many consultancy teams, they were quite successful. There were TWO reasons for this.

  1. When they worked together, they brought the A-Team.
    • The Face, Marty, played by Don Cheadle, who was not only charming, manipulative, and opportunistic, but skilled enough in business to nail the spin brought by
    • The Brains, Clyde, played by Ben Schwartz, who specialized in marketing and spin doctoring and could craft just the right messages for Marty to deliver (and, like the Marketing Mad Men, partied a bit too hard and struggled with addiction), and who would have his plans backed up by
    • The Techie, Doug, played by Josh Lawson, who was a genius in numerical analysis and statistics and could find the right numbers to spin any tale The Brains and/or The Face need to weave to make the sale, and this was all brought together by
    • The Toughie, Jeannie, played by Kristen Bell, who managed the engagements, supported the team, and made sure the clients were reeled in hook, line, and sinker. (Without her, the team probably would have fallen apart, especially given the egos that had to be managed on the team. Don’t overlook the importance of The Toughie!)
  2. They came together, and even after falling outs, stayed together.

The third point is probably the most important.

A team is NOT assembled by a sales manager assembling four random consultants with “the right backgrounds” and throwing them on your project. Four random consultants who

  • might not even speak the language when it comes to your problem domain,
  • could be missing critical skills,
  • have entirely different work styles, and
  • are misaligned on what the right outcomes of a successful engagement for the client actually are!

An A-Team

  • speaks the same language,
  • have all the required skills between them,
  • work well together and have already succeeded doing so, and
  • are aligned on a successful outcome for the client.

In response to my LinkedIn summary on why you need The A-Team for Proper Selection Advice, someone asked how do you identify the right persons? The answer is, YOU DON’T!

The A-Team is already working together, delivering success. And in the case of the House of Lies, they succeed as a team by using their history together to effectively work together to sell the client a shared vision, even if the vision was one big lie. (So imagine the results you would get if you hired an A-Team to work for you, and not a consultancy that’s also an implementor that wants to maximize billable hours.)