A recent post on LinkedIn on Coupa vs. I-Valua that implies it’s always Coupa vs I-valua or that Coupa is better is missing the point entirely. So much so, that the doctor had to call it out (see the initial LinkedIn response here) because it ends up being very deceptive (even if that wasn’t the intent).

The post made a very simple comparison between Coupa vs. I-Valua in big graphical format that basically said the following:

So much wrong with this!

1) Revenue size is in no way indicative of a company’s particular ability to serve YOU. As long as the company is financially stable and has enough support staff for an organization of your size, that’s all you care about. (And it’s obvious they both do since once a company surpasses 100 Million in annual sales, it can serve the vast majority of enterprise clients.)

1b) Neither is time in business relevant once the company has been in business long enough to have a mature solution.

2) “Considered the Innovation Leader” is either opinion, not fact, or bland, marketing BS. By who? The market at large? Well, guess what, in this scenario neither Coupa nor I-valua qualify — Zip is the current darling of ProcureTech. (But don’t go there … please … don’t go there! [Or we’ll have to rip into that assumption too. For now, we’ll be content in reminding you that, despite what Zip claims, there are NO FREE RFPs.] To keep it short and sweet, Zip’s S2P capabilities are still relatively non-existent as it was built as an orchestration platform to connect existing systems and make them work better, and what they offer to plug the gaps you don’t have is not anywhere close to Best in Class.)

3) As Joel was also quick to point out in the comments, good customer references depends upon who you ask (and many of us who have been in the space a long time know that both vendors have very happy customers, some unhappy [former] customers, and customers who are generally satisfied (but wouldn’t go out of their way to give a recommendation). At Spend Matters, where I developed the Source-to-Contract Solution Maps, in the first release, I-valua was top dog and Coupa was average on the customer ratings. As more references poured in, I-valua dropped down to average and Coupa climbed slowly. In other words, both have great customer references, both have average customer references, and both sets of providers have a customer base with mixed success. (And you can’t always blame the company for the success or failure, both sell very advanced solutions and sometimes customers insist on a module they aren’t ready for.)

Furthermore this comparison misses multiple key points that need to be taken into consideration in any comparison, which include, but are definitely not limited to:

4) Simplification is key — and both platforms can simplify extensively! However, the approach is different — Coupa, in simple terms, gives you default configurations that are easy and widely adopted. I-valua built the infinitely customizable platform, and YOU have to work through that process to get it simple. In technical terms, I-valua was built for power users, Coupa for tech novices, but both can be configured to a middle ground.

5) There are more than 2 suites! While Coupa is a finalist in most deals (due to market size), depending on the industry and geography, the final “2” could also include SAP Ariba (yes, still), Jaggaer, GEP, Zycus, Oracle, Corcentric (Determine) or Synertrade, especially in enterprise deals, with another half dozen or so smaller suites emerging in the mid-market. And, for a subset of those deals, Coupa is definitely NOT the best. Sometimes it’s not even close!

5b) While Coupa is undisputedly one of the indirect (sourcing) market leaders, it is still very weak in direct sourcing compared to some of its peers (especially when compared to emerging players built for direct from the ground up). Classically, it had no direct support. The Trade Extensions acquisition gave it support in advanced sourcing and the Llamasoft acquisition gave it direct support in supply chain demand planning, but direct was never at Coupa’s core. For direct industries, it makes a difference. (To be fair, most of Coupa’s peers weren’t built for direct either, but Jaggaer acquired Pool4Tool, I-valua acquired and rebuilt DirectWorks in their platform from the ground up, GEP built NEXXE for supply chain to supplement its weak direct capabilities in SMART, and Synertrade was built from the ground up for direct – one of the few suites that was.)

I could go on, but, with over 666 companies to choose from, it’s never just Coupa vs. someone else, or I-vlaua vs something else. Sometimes neither of them should be in the room. Evaluate the alternatives. And do so after you know your core requirements, as that’s what you need to narrow down to a relevant pool of providers.

And also, you need to consider your sources when you see very simplistic one-side comparisons like these. While there may not be intentional bias, the relative knowledge the author has of different solutions will weight the comparison if the author is not an analyst who has rigorously, and objectively, weighted each platform side by side on its technical merits alone! (Which the doctor did for six years in this case, along with many of the other big names listed above.) (The Spend Matters solution map was a deep technical solution map with over 600 areas of feature/function/process evaluation on the tech axis [and dozens of questions on the customer axis] for a reason. Comparisons are NEVER this easy between suites and sometimes the usual market leader, for your organization, is the default market loser.)

In this situation, the post author’s company does a LOT of Coupa-related platform advisory, the post author has experience with Coupa that predates that in professional CPO or equivalent roles, and is one of the few consultants out there who has a good understanding of the Coupa platform. (And, by the way, there aren’t many of these consultants, especially when you consider that Coupa doesn’t really know Coupa anymore! The only two employees who knew the entire platform end-to-end, that contains over 20 acquisitions over the years, left last year. And the last few years also saw the departure of key personnel from acquisitions that gave them their advanced analytics, optimization, and risk capabilities. As for the doctor, he’s been following Coupa since Procurement Independence Day and consulted for, advised, or did diligence on half their acquisitions over the years. He’s one of the few that probably now knows the core of Coupa better than Coupa, and knows when someone, like the post author, knows a platform well.)

So if you need help identifying the right vendors to consider, and guidance on how you should be comparing them, seek out the niche analyst firms and independent analysts who have been covering the space for over two decades — they’ll give you the right list of vendors to look at, the right factors to consider, and can even help you craft the right RFP. (Unlike the big firms who just publish the same maps with the same vendors who happen to get a ranking that often just happens to be highly correlated to how much they pay the firm. [Remember, vendors have lured big analyst firms astray.])  And when you need help on a shortlist, seek out the consultants who have actually implemented multiple players on that list for their advice.

Last year, while ranting about the plethora of utterly useless logo maps (which includes the Mega Map the doctor created to demonstrate the extreme futility of these maps), we also did a dive into why analyst firm 2*2s are NOT appropriate for tech selection. This is coming up again as a certain firm is really pushing All AI all-the-time and you can tell it’s about to infuse all their maps. Plus, the biggest firms are really pushing their quadrants, waves, and marketscapes, and most of these are showing the same solutions they showed last year and the year before that and the year before that and so on (going back a decade in some cases).

That, and a number of people are lamenting their lack of usefulness on LinkedIn, with one person even creating yet another logo map to highlight the “significant solutions that matter” (but we’ll save that rant for another day), so it’s time to make it clear that these maps are not appropriate (on their own) for tech selection. For example, in a discussion on my post on how your standard sourcing doesn’t work for direct, Thomas Audibert correctly states that static quadrants, in any form, do not work. (And then went on to correctly note that if you say there are, for instance, 80 sourcing solutions, it means that there are at least 20 niche (geographic, industry, customer size, …) categories of interest and that, unless they are catered within 20 different quadrants, this makes no sense to me.

And it doesn’t, because all a map can do, in the best situation, is give you a set of more-or-less comparable solutions that each serve a specific function (so you don’t end up trying to compare a Strategic Sourcing to a catalog-based e-Procurement to an Accounts Payable solution which, of course, serve three completely different functions). If it’s a good map, and by that I mean focussed on two things max, like Spend Matters Solution Map that only scores tech (on one axis) and only presents tech vs average customer scores (on the other axis), then you can use it to verify that one or two of your key requirements are met (such as the tech is solid and the customers are generally happy), but that’s it. (But if it’s a map that squishes 16 different scores into 2 dimensions, that’s useless … you don’t know what is contributing to the scores. What’s most important to you could be the lowest score in that score mish-mash number that looks above average.)

Moreover, at the end of the day, all an analyst can do that is useful is rate a vendor on one or more business independent objective dimensions that can be scored easily and, more importantly, give a customer comfort that the vendor does well on this dimension and they don’t have to worry about it in their evaluation. (For example, if a vendor does well in Spend Matters Solution Map, you know you don’t have to evaluate the underlying technical foundations, which is something most companies aren’t good at.) However, that’s not enough for a selection.

When it comes to tech, it’s important that:

1. it’s solid
2. it fills the need you are searching for
3. it is easy to use by the majority of the users for the functions they will be doing the majority of the time

And, guess what, an analyst can only verify the first requirement. Why? An analyst doesn’t know your needs, you do. Moreover, they don’t know the TQ (technical quotient) of your users, the functions they do daily, or the processes they follow. You do. So, how can you expect an analyst to produce a map that tells you that.

But, if you’ve been paying attention, the solution to your problem is not tech. It’s process. And until you nail that, and then select the tech that matches that process, tech alone will NEVER solve your problem. NEVER.

And since analysts don’t know your business, or your

• business size, Procurement department size, maturity
• culture
• risk tolerance
• innovation level/comfort
• current processes / required processes
• customer service needs
• etc. etc. etc.

or even how these slide on a scale across different companies of different sizes across industries, there’s no way they can produce a map that tells you all of this. Or even a fraction of this.

That’s why you need an analyst or independent consultant that truly understands the solution space you are searching in, what those solutions should do, and how to help you identify the subset that is not only technically solid but is also likely to meet your business requirements. (And remember, It’s the Analyst, not the analyst firm. If the analyst hasn’t reviewed dozens of vendors in the space you are searching in that offer the type of solution you are searching for, doesn’t know the must vs. should vs. nice to have requirements, and, most importantly, doesn’t have the technical chops to validate the solution technically (which is the weakness of every non-IT / non-Engineering business department), he’s not the analyst for you!