ERP week on Spend Matters

April 30th, 2007 at 06:34am David Bush - Iasta

Just as the Discovery Channel pioneered “Shark Week”, Jason blazed a trail on ERP week from SAP Sapphire, last week. His posts have been educated and informative about the direction of the industry. I raised a very skeptical eyebrow on his first post about 3 sourcing events for under $10k, but he clarified and I now accept the explanation of the deliverable. All in all, it is a very interesting round-up of how SAP has really committed to the eSourcing space. I expected more of Spend Matters posts from Sapphire to involve the very wide range of SAP products, but almost every one has been about eSourcing. SAP pointing its cross-hairs on our industry is not a bad thing, though. Frankly, it brings tremendous credibility to the functionality that we all profess will help procurement, and still many companies have yet to embrace. From our perspective, we have beaten SAP head-to-head 3 times in the last 5 months and probably lost just as many or more. A formidable competitor but not invincible.

I have to admit, however, I would have never pegged the German ERP giant to be the more progressive and committed vendor in this space. This is a new SAP and it will be interesting to see where they determine the diminishing returns are. Wherever that point is will start the future innovation cycles of the BoB vendors that survive the next round of consolidations and flame outs - traditionally caused by self-destructive and megalomaniacal behavior.

Finally, I do immensely respect SAP, do not get me wrong. However, they are not the Red Cross and wild fantasies of a kind and charitable leviathan with shiny new customer friendly pricing is more a function of opportunity, not directive. Much of the pricing that SAP clients get will depend on the moxie of the sales rep and progress of the sales quarter. I personally see SAP pricing all over the place, from company to company, for seemingly unpredictable reasons. You can easily see SAP eSourcing cost you 2-3x more than a BoB solution per year, even though you thought you were getting a great deal that claimed eSourcing and SRM to be “thrown in”.

Email Forward & Bookmarks

Close this Window Bookmark and Share This Page

Save to Browser Favorites / Bookmarks

Ask backflip blinklist BlogBookmark Bloglines BlogMarks Blogsvine BuddyMarks BUMPzee! CiteULike co.mments Connotea

del.icio.us Digg diigo DotNetKicks DropJack dzone Facebook Fark Faves Feed Me Links Friendsite folkd.com

Furl Google Hugg Jeqq Kaboodle kirtsy linkaGoGo LinksMarker Ma.gnolia Mister Wong Mixx MySpace

MyWeb Netvouz Newsvine oneview OnlyWire PlugIM Propeller Reddit Rojo Segnalo Shoutwire Simpy

Slashdot Sphere Sphinn Spurl Squidoo StumbleUpon Technorati ThisNext Webride Windows Live Yahoo!

Email This to a Friend

Copy HTML: 

 If you like this then please subscribe to the RSS Feed.

Powered by Bookmarkify™

More »

Entry Filed under: General, Reverse Auctions, Technology / SaaS, e-Sourcing Marketplace