Event Summary
Peregrine
Software, up to now a specialist in software for infrastructure management,
has moved into the eCommerce arena with its first offering. Their Get.It solution
will allow employees to acquire assets by buying, leasing or taking from existing
stock.
Market
Impact
Peregrine
seems to be avoiding the crowded market for consumables procurement to specialize
on assets, which is close to their traditional areas of expertise. Arguing that
the consumables that are made available by traditional E-procurement vendors
account for only five percent of the good purchased by business, Peregrine is
attacking the rest of the market with an application that allows organizations
to make their buying decisions based on life cycle costs, which are evaluated
by its AssetCenter applications. Among other suppliers, Peregrine has partnered
with Commerce One, which is likely to ensure that Peregrine's customers can
buy consumables as well as the more complicated assets that are the focus of
the product.
Peregrine's
current customers are almost sure to adopt the Get.It product for their E-purchasing
application, thereby cutting out the leaders in the space (except for Commerce
One). It does not seem likely at this point, though, that the majority of companies
thinking of entering into E-procurement will have a need that is much more easily
served by the Aribas of the world.
User
Recommendations
The product is targeted to companies that are particularly interested in electronic
procurement of assets. For these companies Peregrine's new product may have
real value. A detained feature analysis is of course required before moving
forward, and this should certainly include the extent to which consumables (MRO)
purchasing is handled appropriately for their needs. Note, though, that companies
will be deploying an increasing number of self-service applications - not just
purchasing, but also expense reporting, human resources, travel arrangements
and attendance tracking - that integrate with the same back-end that handles
consumable purchasing. A company that needs to bring the purchasing of both
assets and consumables to the employee desktop may be forced to choose between
having a single system like Peregrine's handle all their purchasing, or splitting
their purchasing in order to take advantage of the unification of other self-service
application suites. Peregrine must be thinking about a solution, such as partnering
with a self-service product suite company or - with its $3.8 billion market
capitalization - simply buying one of the smaller companies in that field. Given
that Get.It is newly released, we'd expect the play-or-purchase decision to
be made within four to nine months.