Event Summary
Ariba and Commerce One have each enhanced their buyer-wide products with analytic capabilities. Commerce One and Sagent Technology, Inc. have announced the immediate availability of the BuySite Business Intelligence Kit. This add-on to Commerce One's BuySite provides corporate buyers with information about key metrics that define the corporate spending behavior, including enterprise-spending habits for individual commodities and suppliers and on-contract vs. off-contract spending.
Ariba, Inc. and Informatica Corp. have announced Informatica CommerceAnalytics (ICA) for Ariba. Available to all customers of the Ariba Buyer product, the ICA similarly extracts information from the Ariba system to feed an analytic application that can be accessed by a variety of decision makers across the enterprise.
Market Impact
It is a measure of how youthful this industry is that the leaders are just now getting around to providing a robust set of metrics and analytical tools with their enterprise applications. It's a sure bet that similar capabilities will soon be available from most of the first and second tier providers of e-purchasing systems.
Once analytics become a significant feature in this market, the sky's the limit for additional applications. We'll be very surprised if similar products are not announced before too long for market operators and suppliers. A bit further down the line we'd also expect to see predictive tools added to purchasing applications. The data-mining experts can probably predict when an employee is about to increase her rate of rogue purchases, or detect when a commodity is about to be purchased in large enough volume to warrant renegotiating the volume discount. Undoubtedly such CRM analysis will appear before the end of the year in a purchasing application near you.
User Recommendations
Commerce One BuySite users and Ariba Buyer users will certainly be interested in acquiring the appropriate package. For others who are interested in making e-purchasing acquisitions this announcement raises the bar for all products, but we expect others to follow suit with announcements in fairly short order. It's also worth noting that if another application that rates much higher in your evaluation cannot commit to a similar feature, you may be able to get similar analytic capabilities from a third party package at the cost of more integration on your own part.