Category Archives: SaaS

Ten Best Practices for (Software) Vendors, Part 2

In Part 1 we noted that, just like buyers, you need help. And what we left unsaid is that most analysts, bloggers, and self proclaimed experts aren’t giving you the help you need. Which, to be fair, they shouldn’t, because it’s worth money and they need to make a living too. However, they should at least be giving you the insight you need to understand where you need help and how they could help you, because they shouldn’t expect you to hire them on their word alone that they are good. You should have something to judge that as well as whether or not their expertise is in the area you need it.

So, just like we outlined Five Best Practices for Buyers, which built off of our articles on five easy mistakes source to pay tech buyers can avoid and even a critical sixth mistake most tech buyers make in source to pay (who need to realize that No Tech Should Be Forever), we are giving you the best practices you, as a Source-to-Pay/Supply Chain Front End vendor, need to understand to be successful.

Yesterday we gave you the first three:

  1. Identify the Market Sector You Are Competing In
    … and the Niche Your Solution is Targeting
  2. Do Your Market Research
  3. Define Your Target Industries

which revolved around market research. Today we give you the next four, which revolve around the technology solution.

#4 Identify the Core Pain Points Your Solution Will Address in the First Release

Once you understand the market sector and niche you are competing in, and the problems potential customers are having, you need to identify the subset of pain points you are going to address. (And stick to them until you have a solution that minimally addresses them. Flip-flopping will not only waste time and money, but distract you away from a core you will still need to build.) This may mean tweaking your definition of the “problem” slightly to moderately and changing the product design and roadmap you drafted when you started, but it costs a lot less to do it before you start development than when you are halfway through a development cycle and realize the focus was wrong. Moreover, targeting the core pain points you identified ensures you have a solution that not only solves a real problem but also gives you access to a market that is not already over-crowded with existing solutions that would directly compete against yours.

Make sure to validate that the pain points are common to multiple customers, and not just the companies the founders came from or your alpha partners and beta customers. Remember that your alpha partners and beta customers are either the leaders and innovators in the top 10% of the market (and way ahead of their peers in operations, supply chain, processes, and/or technology utilization and readiness) or the up-and-comers willing to take risks on innovative new tech to catch up to the market leaders. They are ahead of their peers in functional capability and/or willingness to take a risk, and it could be years before the rest of the market catches up. You want to be building something that a majority of the market is ready for once you prove the solution and your resiliency as a company, not something that will limit you to a very small group of industry leaders and/or risk takers.

#5 Understand the Data Needs and Design the Full Data Model

Before you code a single line, go back to your market research and look at all of the data your competitors are collecting, the data the customers are looking to keep track of, and the data that is available in the systems you will (likely) integrate with. What you have to remember is that, when it comes to software, just like the architecture you start with determines what you can build feature and function wise, once you start with a data model and your developers start coding to that model, extending it can be exceedingly difficult later. So start with the right data model. (Then do the architectural core, which should support not only all of the initial functions but those functions identified as potential future improvements based upon secondary pain points or common competitive functionality. Just like a foundation for a two story house will only ever support a two story house, you need to build the foundation for a high-rise if that’s what you want to build, even if you are only building one floor at a time.)

#6 Understand the Current Customer Processes and Typical Restrictions

If you don’t understand what you are trying to automate, what processes your target customers are comfortable with, what restrictions they have to work within, and don’t design your technology to work within the processes and restrictions, it won’t matter how great your tech is because it won’t be adopted. Unadopted technology is even worse than unsold technology — unsold technology can be spun as “just coming out of development“, unadopted technology means you don’t have happy customers using it, which gets interpreted as “it doesn’t do what it was intended to do“, and that will really hold you back.

#7 Don’t Overlook the UX (User Experience)

You could have the best tech ever, but if it’s

  1. not an attractive technology that looks easy to use,
  2. not a technology that is actually easy to use, and
  3. not one that fits within their process mindset, then it won’t get adopted and used by the intended customers. And we’ve already indicated that non-adoption is worse than a lack of sales.

Come back tomorrow for Part 3 where we will conclude our deep dive into ten best practices.

Ten Best Practices for (Software) Vendors, Part 1

In a recent article, we gave you Five Best Practices for Buyers, which built off of our articles on five easy mistakes source to pay tech buyers can avoid and even a critical sixth mistake most tech buyers make in source to pay (who need to realize that No Tech Should Be Forever).

But it’s not only the buyers who need help. You vendors do too, even if you won’t (publicly) admit it.

(We’ll just say this. If you didn’t need any help, a lot of you would be doing better than you are. the doctor has seen, and sees almost weekly, vendors with great tech who never get beyond the 1M to 5M mark because they didn’t understand either what the market needed or how to sell the great product they have, vendors with great service get lost in the marketing noise made by bigger peers, and vendors with inferior tech but better focus get ahead quickly with the right messaging and a partial solution but then stall out when new competitors with better solutions hit the market, and so on. Each of these vendors have, or at least had, the potential to be bigger and better if they just understood where they were weak, focussed on the right issues, extended the platform appropriately, and, if necessary, obtained the appropriate help.)

Just like you need a great mix of talent, transition, and technology to build a great company, you need a great mix of problem targeting, customer focus, solution capability, process fit, and affordability to build up your market share. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Let’s step back and go through the best practices you need to get the right orientation.

#1 Identify the Market Sector You Are Competing In
… and the Niche Your Solution is Targeting

As an analyst and due diligence professional the doctor doesn’t want to tell you how many times he heard the company was started because “product XYZ didn’t solve problem BIGGIE we were having“, and neither did it’s main competitors that we identified in a Google search, when it was often the case the product they were expecting to solve problem BIGGIE was never designed or intended to solve that problem. For example, during COVID, online collaboration and payment portals became the craze, and many I2P/AP/Payment solutions came into the limelight. Looking into these closely, it didn’t take long for some us to find out that many of these were started because bill.com or Quickbooks or another e-billing (management) platform didn’t solve the invoicing or accounts payable problems they were having. They searched for bill management, invoice management, etc. and found cheap online small business solutions, and didn’t research a single, true, accounts payable (AP) or invoice to pay (I2P) solution among the dozens out there and then wondered why they didn’t stand out in the AP/I2P/e-Payment market when they tried to sell their platform, raise money, or get acquired by Private Equity or a bigger company (at a high multiple).

What’s important to understand here is that you need to understand the broader space you are playing in, the terminology that is typically used, the standard solution categories that are out there, and the baseline capabilities that are expected/present in the majority of solutions in each solution category/niche. Talk with peers, use your local professional organizations, use free analyst firm and independent authority resources, and get the terminology down. For example, purchasing, procurement, and sourcing have well accepted meanings in the analyst world, with detailed outlines of what those categories should contain and associated vendor lists, but if you don’t understand that, you might not realize that your definition of these terms is completely different than the majority of the space, leading you to research the wrong vendors and believe certain capabilities aren’t out there when actually solutions with those capabilities are actually quite common. For example, let’s say your old company used “purchasing” for tactical catalog buying and “procurement” for strategic buying, and you researched procurement vendors when starting your company to create a new solution for strategic buying. Since you didn’t research strategic sourcing vendors, you might come to the conclusion that most of the existing RFP options were shallow and your idea to inject more analytics and basic optimization inline is industry changing and enough for an MVP, only to find out 18 months later you have a dozen competitors who are two years ahead of you and you can’t break into the larger mid-market because all your potential customers can find 3 to 5 more mature vendors for their short-list (and many buyers, who are risk averse, think start-ups are risky and will avoid them if there are other options, especially when that’s the mandate from IT or the C-Suite).

#2 Do Your Market Research

Once you understand the market you are playing in, the top players in that market as well as the up-and-comers, and those that play in the niche where your solution best fits, do competitive research and understand what the subset of vendors you will be competing against offer. What core capabilities do they provide? What do they do well? What do they do poorly? And, most importantly, what pain points are they not hitting, or not hitting in a way that works for the markets you are going after?

Then acquire the right customer-oriented market research in the market sector and niche that you are targeting. Specifically, market-research that focusses on the problems the customers want the solutions to solve and the capabilities they are looking for. Augment this with the competitor and customer research you’ve already done to identify whether or not your hypothesis that the “problem” you identified when you started the company is

  1. a real problem experienced across a large number of customers in one-or-more industries and
  2. not solved, or not solved in a good way, by the majority of solutions out there.

If the answer is “no”, even if you have a good solution, you don’t have a very marketable solution, no matter how great your technology is. A marketable solution is one needed by the market that is sufficiently differentiated in a way that allows you to easily sell it to grow your business, and, if necessary, attract then investment needed to help you expand the product functionality, the target market, and the business overall. Do NOT skip this step, or you will waste a lot of time and money (which will typically be in the man years and millions of dollars) to learn something you could have learned for well under 100K.

#3 Define Your Target Industries

While many problems / solution needs are common across industries in general, when you get down into the specifics, the processes and solution capabilities can often be quite different across industries. Think sourcing. If you are sourcing finished goods, any indirect sourcing solution does the trick. If you are sourcing raw materials and parts for manufacturing, then you need a direct sourcing solution that supports bills of materials and deep product and material specifications.

For just about any solution category you can define in Source to Pay, you will find that the needs across different subsets of industries will be different enough that you will not be able to build a one-size fits all solution. So focus in early, so you can build something suitable and attractive to that industry subset. Remember that many industries are so big that you can build a decently sized company just focussing on one core industry at first (and if you get it right, much more than the 1M to 5M range where most startups get stuck).

Come back tomorrow for Part 2 where we will continue our deep dive into ten best practices.

Yes Mid-Markets, 120K is More Than Enough for Source-to-Pay!

the doctor is sure that by now you have certain (mega-)suite vendors whispering in your ear that you really need their full 1 Million+ (annual subscription) S2P solution to maximize efficiency and savings (and that the doctor was crazy*0 when he told you that you should be able to get a sufficient Source-to-Pay solution for 120K a year), which, while possibly true stated that way, you don’t need to spend nearly that much to maximize your ROI.

But how do you maximize ROI without necessarily maximizing savings and/or efficiency? Simple! The same way you optimize profit by optimizing COGS vs. increasing volume. Just like every $1 of savings goes straight to the bottom line vs only $0.10 of revenue, every dollar you don’t spend on a technology solution goes straight to the bottom line vs. only squeezing out an extra 1% on savings.*1

But the best way to see this is to, gasp, do some math! Let’s take three mid-markets at 250M, 500M, and 750M. We’ll use industry averages for COGS (with 33% salaries & contractors; 2% utilities; 5% rental; and 20% amortization/depreciation) and assume 40% external spend. Depending on the industry, external costs can go to 50% or more, but not much in the Mid-Market (MM). We’ll assume an average 5% savings potential and 80% spend addressability over 3 years (as some existing contracts will be long term and not addressable in the short term, and some tail spend will just be too small / one time to ever bother with). We’ll assume that a base solution can achieve 80% of that savings potential, or 4% over three years (if there is sufficient manpower to address all the relevant categories [semi]-strategically).

 

Size 250M 500M 750M
Addressability (80% of 40%) 80M 160M 240M
Savings Potential @ 4% 3.2M 6.4M 9.6M
3 Year Cost 360K 360K 360K
ROI 8.8 17.6 26.4
Savings Potential @ 5% 4M 8M 12M
3 Year Cost 3M 3M 3M
ROI 1.4 2.7 4.0

 

Now, what type of ROI would you like to see if you are a 250M MM? A 1.4X ROI or a 8.8X ROI? the doctor knows what type of ROI he’d like to see! Also, if the mega-suite provider cuts the price in half, it only doubles the ROI to 3.2X. Barely acceptable, and you need the manpower to identify the full savings potential and everything to go perfectly to realize it. (What’s the probability that this will hold true continuously for three [3] years? Zero Percent. 0%)

Unless you have a (very) large category over 10M (where the savings potential on that category is 500K), the reality is that the 80% solution you will get by an average across-the-board solution / self-assembled platform-powered BoB suite will provide you an ROI that far outshines what the oversized, overpriced solutions will do for you as a mid-sized business. (Those suites are only needed for 1B+ enterprises where there are 50M to 100M+ categories where an extra 1% makes a huge difference.)

the doctor loves sourcing optimization, but it typically won’t find that much savings beyond what you can find with good spend analysis on RFP data in a category < 5M. (It might take a few hours of spend analysis, but you will get 80% of the savings with intelligence. If the vendor includes an affordable optimization module (2K/month; likely with model size caps), then you should use it on every category, if just to get a baseline, as you will get a good ROI from the module with continuous use, but if they want 10K/month and you are a 250M business, you likely won’t get enough of a return, especially since most of your categories aren’t that large or complex. Note that if you are a 1B+ multi-national enterprise, the story is the exact opposite. You absolutely need it and in your well managed categories, you won’t identify enough savings without it.)

For most categories, all you need to do in sourcing is 3-5 bids, side by side unit cost and total landed cost (TLC) comparisons, supplier award selection with RFP (spend) analysis, contract cutting to capture the price, configured POs in the eProcurement system to capture the contracted price, and line-item match on the invoice to the PO to make sure you’re paying what you should be. This is two-decade old tech now, but more than sufficient, when properly implemented and enforced, to capture 80% of the “savings” (or cost avoidance) in a category. Procurement savings come more from the proper implementation of a process than from technology that enables that process. What technology does is make it easy to do the process efficiently and effectively because it can guide you through the process, prevent you from missing steps or making mistakes, provide you the insight you need to make the best decisions, and even train you on best practices you aren’t familiar with. And allow you to repeat the process many more times on many more categories in a much shorter timeframe than if you were trying to do it all by hand.

Plus, the technology will allow you to do more with less, so you can minimize the need to expand the Procurement team as the company grows. Remember, good people cost $$$. In fact, a fully burdened high-end resource will cost as much as you pay for the tech, if you are paying the right price. This means that the tech will not only provide you an ROI on measurable cost reductions, but a measurable cost avoidance as you grow as you will not need to add as many people to a Procurement department that will become more efficient over time (as more and more tactical tasks get automated, freeing up the team to focus on value-add tasks). (Remember, tech never replaces the people you need, it just makes them many times more efficient so that you only need one or two high performing individuals for a function vs ten for one that is poorly managed; allowing you to add those ten resources elsewhere to produce more product or grow the business further. However, remember that Procurement does more than one function, so you may still need those 10 people for contract management, supplier development, additional strategic sourcing events, etc. but you won’t need them processing paperwork.)

So don’t overpay for S2P tech. You absolutely need S2P tech, but overpriced tech won’t get you the ROI!

*0 they may be right, I may be crazy … but it just may be a lunatic you’re looking for …

*1 An extra savings of 10% on a maximum savings of 10% leads to a maximum additional savings of 1% overall on a single category. In inflationary times, which we are now back to, you’ll never find more than 10% slack in the TCO of any category. In fact, you’ll do good to find 5%, which means going from average capability to advanced capability will only shave an extra 0.5% off of the total category spend on average.

Don’t think that these inflationary times are going away anytime soon. Supply chains are at their shakiest thanks to both the pandemic and the repercussions thereof, the rapid increase in climate change which has led to a rapid increase in natural disasters, the increased geopolitical destabilization around the globe, and the rebelling workforce, many of whom have gone from living barely above the actual poverty line (relative to where they live) to below it. Now add that to the flat and recessionary economic conditions in most major GDP players, and we won’t be seeing good times ahead for quite a while.

Five Best Practices for Buyers (when searching for software solutions)

Building on our piece on five easy mistakes source to pay tech buyers can avoid, here’s a piece on five (5) best practices to get the buy right. We’re even throwing in a bonus practice since we dove deep into the critical sixth mistake most tech buyers make in source to pay (who need to realize that No Tech Should Be Forever).

#1 Understand your core pain points

Don’t buy based on hype, buy based on need. Any good salesperson can spin you a good yarn on how much that sourcing solution will save, how that SRM will get your suppliers in line, and how that tail-spend solution will prevent your spend from going into a tail-spin. But there’s no guarantees that any of those solutions will solve your current problems, which might require e-Procurement or Spend Analysis.

Review your source-to-pay processes and determine where your pain points are. Is it in quote collection or analysis? Adequate supplier discovery, identification, or certification? Contract negotiation, implementation, or obligation management? Purchase orders and approvals? Invoice verification and matching? Opportunity identification? Supplier proliferation? If you don’t know where the majority of time is being spent and how much of that time is fighting fires, doing unnecessary tactical work, or taking too long to do something that should be quick, then you’re letting someone else identify your problems, which might turnout to be problems relatively small in the grand scheme of things.

#2 Understand which pain points can be best alleviated with technology vs. those that can be best alleviated with process improvements.

Technology can’t solve all of your ills. (And it especially can’t solve all of your ills if it is based on Automated Idiocy. Remember, that’s what the “AI” they are selling you is.) It’s important that you understand what technology can and can’t do before you look for a solution. This will help you identify honest providers offering honest wares and vapourware vendors selling silicon snake oil.

Consider the above pain points. If it’s quote collection, a good RFP system will help. If it’s quote analysis, maybe, maybe not. It may be the complexity of the ask, and not the complexity of the process, that’s the problem. If it’s supplier discovery, you will likely need a discovery platform or a large supplier network; if it’s supplier identification, possibly just a better process of identifying which suppliers you’re already using who can solve a new problem for you. Supplier certification, that requires manual review and sometimes tech can’t help at all. When it comes to contract negotiation, while platforms can shuttle contract drafts back and forth, negotiation is between people. Implementation and obligation management, that’s the kicker, and more than what you can accomplish with just an electronic filing cabinet, which is what many “contract management” systems are. Purchase orders are as much a process problem as a technology problem, most AP systems can generate them. Approvals, process problem to identify it, but often a technology problem to ensure that the process is followed. Invoice verification — manual approval is required but m-way invoice matching can help with the process by identifying the corresponding purchase order, any payments made to date, any credits accrued to date, any approvals required, and so on. Opportunity identification? Well, all of the pain points you identified represent opportunities, but beyond that, you’ll likely need spend analysis. Supplier proliferation — that’s a process and management issue. All the SRM does is track the suppliers.

If you don’t understand what the pain points are that tech can actually solve, you’ll never select the right tech.

#3 Identify your top 3 pain points that can be addressed with technology and the corresponding source-to-pay module(s) you need to address those pain points.

Once you’ve identified the pain points, whittled down to the subset of pain points that can be best addressed by technology, and then identified the three (3) that will have the biggest impact if addressed, you can continue with your quest for tech.

#4 Compile an appropriate shortlist of vendors.

Once you know what you want to address with tech, and why, you can start the process of identifying an appropriate short-list of vendors. This is not just three to five vendor names given to you, or three to five vendor names that come up first in a Google search — it’s three to five vendors that are confirmed to offer a module that will address the same (sub)set of problems you are looking to address.

This is not three to five vendors that claim to offer the same technology, as many vendors will purposely use, and sometimes abuse, the same terminology in an effort to sell completely different products. For example, sourcing, procurement, and purchasing are sometimes used to mean the same thing by three vendors, and sometimes mean completely different things by three vendors. There are vendors that call their sourcing systems procurement, purchasing vendors which just offer catalogs, and so on. You have to research their offerings carefully to determine whether or not they truly offer a solution to what you are looking for.

#5 Determine what you need in a partner before you start evaluating vendors and the RFPs they submit.

You don’t just need a vendor that can provide technology, you need a vendor that can provide a solution and work with you, offering as little or as much as you need in the way of training, implementation, integration, and services. You need a venture that will match your culture, get along with your team and make sure you are successful with their product. You need to identify everything that makes a good vendor before you start the evaluation, otherwise you will grade just on the tech, and the tech is not enough. (It’s a necessary part of the solution, but not a sufficient part on its own.) All supply chain problems have a human element. Never forget that.

#6: Bonus Get help with the shortlist and the RFP.

If you’re not familiar with the technology, the vendors, or the terminology, it can be difficult to determine which vendors might actually be able to solve your problems and what vendors will just bamboozle you into thinking they can* when you send them the RFP. Get help from someone who is an expert in the technology, the vendors, and the true capabilities the vendors offer.

* Not necessarily on purpose; a misunderstanding caused by different usages of terminology (see point #4) can cause a vendor to believe they have the perfect solution for you.

Don’t Trust an Analyst Firm to Score UX and Implementation Time!

A post late last month on LinkedIn started off as follows:

“If you’ve ever read any research papers or solution maps on procurement tech, you’ve probably figured out a couple of things.

1. It’s confusing and overly complex
2. It doesn’t cover the basic, most obvious-of-the-obvious fundamentals that everyone needs to consider.

These are:

– User interface and user experience (UI/UX)
– Ease and speed of implementation

Why don’t they do this?

Honestly, I don’t know the answer.

The cynic in me says it’s because their biggest paymasters have a horrible UI/UX and require a very complex and lengthy implementation.”

This really bothered me, not because UX and implementation time aren’t super important, they are, and they are among the biggest determinants of adoption (which is critical to success), but because anyone would think an analyst firm should address this.

The reality is that no proper analyst will attempt to score these because they are completely subjective! As a result:

  1. There is no objective, function-based/capability-based scale that could be scored consistently by any knowledgeable analyst on the subject and
  2. What is a great experience to one person, with a certain expectation of tech based upon prior experience and knowledge of their function, can be complete CR@P to another person.

Now, some firms do bury such subjective evaluations on UX and implementation time in their 2*2s where they squish an average of 6 subjective ratings into a dimension, but that is why those maps are complete garbage! (See: Dear Analyst Firms: Please stop mangling maps, inventing award categories, and evaluating what you don’t understand!) So no self-respecting analyst should do it. As an example, one analyst might like solutions with absolute minimalist design, with everything hidden and everything automated against pre-built rules (that may, or may not, be right for your organization and may result in an automated sourcing solution placing a Million dollar order with payment up front for a significant early payment discount to a supplier that subsequently files for bankruptcy and doesn’t deliver your goods) while a second might like full user control through a multi-screen multi-step interface for what could be a one-screen and one-step function and a third might like to see as much capability and information as possible squished into every screen and long for the days of text-based green-screens where you weren’t distracted by graphics and animations and design. Each of these analyst would score the same UX completely different! On a 10 point scale, for a given UX design, three analysts in the same firm could give scores of 1, 5, and 10, averaged to 5 … and how is that useful? It’s not!

(And while analysts can define scales of maturity for the technology the UX is based on, just because a vendor is using the latest technology, that doesn’t mean their UX is any good. New technology can be just as horrendously misused as old technology.)

The same goes for implementation time. An analyst that mainly focuses on simple sourcing/procurement where you should just be able to flick a SaaS switch and go would think that an implementation time of more than a week is abysmal, but an analyst that primarily analyzes CLM and SMDM would call BS on anything less than six weeks and expect three months for an implementation time. This is because, for CLM, you have to find all the contracts, feed them in, run them through AI for automated meta-data extraction, do manual review, and set up new processes while for SMDM you have to integrate half a dozen systems, do data integrations, cleansing, and enrichment through cross-referencing with third party sources, create golden records, do manual spot-check reviews, and push the data back . Implementation time is dependent on the solution, the architecture, what it does, what data it needs, what systems it needs to be integrated with, what support there is for data extraction and loading in those legacy systems, etc. Implementation time needs to be judged against the minimum amount of time to do it effectively, which is also customer dependent. Expecting an analyst to understand all the potential client situations is ridiculous. Expecting them to craft an “average customer situation”, base an implementation time on this, and score a set of random vendors accordingly is even more ridiculous.

The factors ARE absolutely vital, but they need to be judged by the buying organization as part of the review cycle, AFTER they’ve verified that the vendor can offer a solution that will meet

  • their current, most pressing, needs as an organization,
  • their evolving needs as they will need to get other problems under control, and
  • do so with a solution that is technically sound and complete with respect to the two requirements above while also being capable of scaling up and evolving over time (as well as capable of being plugged into an appropriate platform-based ecosystem through a fully Open API).

A good analyst an guide you on ways to judge this and what you might want to consider, but that’s it … you have to be the final judge, not them.

That’s why, when the doctor co-designed Solution Map when he was a Consulting Analyst for Spend Matters, the Solution Map focussed on scoring the technological foundations, which could be judged on an objective scale based on the evolution of underlying technology over the past two-plus decades and/or the evolution of functionality to address a specific problem over the past two-plus decades. It’s up to you whether you like it or not, think the implementation time frames are good or not, believe the vendor is innovative or not, and are satisfied with the vendor size and maturity, not the analyst. Those are business viewpoints that are business dependent. Analysts should score capabilities and foundations, particularly where buyers are ill-equipped to do so (and this also means that analysts scoring technology MUST be trained technologists with a formal, educational, background in technology — computer science, engineering, etc. — and experience in Software Development or Implementation –and yes, the doctor realizes this is not always the case, and that’s probably why most of the analyst maps are squished dimensions across half-a-dozen subjective factors [as they are not capable of properly evaluating what they are claiming to be subject matter experts in; as a comparison, when you have a journalist or historian or accountant rating modern SaaS platforms that’s the equivalent of having a plumber certify your electrical wiring or a landscaper judging the strength of the framing in your new house — sure, they’re trade pros, but do you really want to judge their opinion that the wiring is NOT going to start an electrical fire and burn your house down or the frame is strong enough for the 3,000 pounds of appliances you intend to put on the 2nd floor? the doctor would hope not!).

The cynic might say they don’t want to embarrass their sponsors, but the realist will realize the analysts can’t effectively judge vendors on this and the smart analysts won’t even try (but will instead guide you on the factors you should consider and look for when evaluating potential solutions on the shortlist they can help you build by giving you a list of vendors that provide the right type of solution and are technically sound, vs. three random vendors from a Google search that don’t even offer the same type of solution).