the doctor loves SolutionMaps. He loves them for many reasons.
But most important of all, it’s because of the scientist in him.
SolutionMaps are expert. And constant. And data driven.
Unlike some analyst reports whose methodology and “qualifications” often insult the name of the authors and parent firm (e.g., requiring baseline revenue or geographic footprint requirements further tailored to weed out smaller providers or fiercest competitors) and typically have participation and validation requirements that change from report to report, SolutionMaps are based on rigidly defined capabilities (where every capability has a pre-defined scale at least to 3, if not to 5) that must be demoed for a 2 and rigorously demoed for a 3.
And these requirements will not change from iteration to iteration. More specifically, as long as the doctor is involved, the scale for any requirement will be static for at least one year and while requirements may be added, they will persist for at least one year before being dropped. And, furthermore, since SolutionMaps are designed so that the average score for any vendor should be 2.5 to 3 (or less, depending on the “Map”), the number of 4’s should be 10% or less, and the number of 5’s should be 1% (or much less), and since functionality does not typically improve that much quarter or over quarter, when we have to do a renormalization after a year or more (when we hit enough 5’s and 4’s), we can do a fair, equal adjustment against historical scores (which can’t be done when everyone starts at a 5).
And, as we noted yesterday, these rigid objective scales not only allow an expert analyst to score providers consistently against a common goal, but multiple analysts to do so, because the baselines are all set in stone! Whether it’s the doctor, the prophet, the maverick, or the revolutionary doing the scoring, it’s all consistent on one scale.
Moreover, we know that technology is only half the battle, so half of the scoring is based on average customer reference scores, which are scored over a dozen or more factors, not just one or two! This also means that, just as in real life, there’s more than one right answer depending upon whether you value technology innovation or customer service more, or just want an equal mix. Plus, the ability to differently weight the analyst vs. the customer dimension allows vendor profiles to be constructed against different personas, because the right vendor changes based upon your actual needs.
But that’s not the only reason the doctor loves SolutionMaps. The other reason is that — they are surprising!
Given all the angst that is out there from some current and many former SAP Ariba customers, would you have expected them to score so well on the customer references? Not by a mile! Obviously this vendor is a love it or hate it or nothing in between type of vendor, with a lot of customers lovin’ it! (Kinda like McDonald’s.)
Also, I bet not a single person, including the entire analyst team, would pick EC Sourcing to the be the value leader for Nimble Sourcing. But one thing is for sure, it’s days of being overlooked as a small Best-of-Breed vendor are now over! (Especially since you can set up decent size RFX projects in 15 minutes. If you don’t believe the doctor, ask for a live demo and see it for yourself.) Also, while we always knew it was the little-engine-that-could, no one predicted that Keelvar had made it so far up the hill. Sure, it still has a lot of work to do on rounding out its RFX and Auction features (for example, it’s easy to lock lots in optimization, but you can’t force vendors to fill all or nothing in setup), it’s hit on every major optimization requirement, developed a novel approach to parametric bidding, and is currently weaving in AI in a novel way (which, when released in a quarter, could bump it even higher in the rankings).
But sourcing and optimization weren’t the only surprises. In analytics, large pieces of the pie went to, wait for it, Anydata and Spendency! While the analyst team expected (even though the market may not have) SpendHQ to do well, this was a bit of a surprise. These are both new players with small customer bases relative to the big boys, but they both made an amazing grade.
In SRM, we have State of Flux and PRGX Lavante killing it on the capabilities front (even if not so much on the customer references, but customer response counts for State of Flux, who participated at the last minute, were low and PRGX forgot about the customer references entirely), and are likely to fair better overall next iteration as more customer references come in. And from a reference perspective, Ivalua and SAP Ariba (yes, SAP Ariba again) are just killing it. Ivalua is really proving that a single-platform home-grown S2P suite can really do it all (well, almost all, they need work in optimization and direct sourcing, but then again, name any S2P platform that has both of these capabilities) and do most of it well. You can learn a lot of lessons in sixteen years, and Ivalua is showing it.
In other words, when you dive past the marketing, and the vision, and the pretty, pretty deck, and just get to the heart of the problem, or in this case, the solution, sometimes the results surprise you. But that’s a good thing. This knowledge benefits everyone and we don’t expect these (relative) rankings to be static. Not in the least.
the doctor looks forward to the next iteration of SolutionMaps, and another 8 to 12 vendors being added, and seeing how things shake up. It will be illuminating to say the least.
And to those vendors who didn’t fair as they expected, shake it off and get back to work. You know what you need to do to get a better score. Nothing is hidden here. You have the RFI. You have the scoring scale. You have our feedback. It’s all up to you!
