Earlier this week, I had the chance to meet with a number of Oracle team members at all levels of their solution organization, within procurement and Spend Management. Some of these personalities I’ve known for a decade, including David Hope-Ross, who used to sit in my position when I was briefing him as a Gartner analyst during my time at FreeMarkets. Of course, while it would be fun get back at David for his critical quadrants and write-ups of my organization at the time, the actual truth is that for the first time since starting Spend Matters, I’m actually quite impressed with the overall direction of Oracle in the Spend Management world. In fact, I believe they’re approaching or surpassing SAP in certain areas, such as their new approach to supplier management and a do-it-yourself classification engine, which eliminates the largely black-box approach of many others in the market. It reminds me of Spend Radar in this regard.
Moreover, Oracle’s solution interfaces put SAP to shame (outside of Spend Performance Management) and overall usability across their source-to-pay spectrum is up there with some of the better “best-of-breed” providers. One thing that impresses me about Oracle relative to SAP is the overall cohesiveness of the team. SAP is running in multiple directions with their procurement, sourcing and spend analysis products with and solution leadership groups. Each area ranges from excellent (e.g., Spend Performance Management) to wanting in terms of vision. This is directly reflected in the solutions as well (e.g., Spend Performance Management is clearly a stand-alone one-stop-shop solution while SRM has numerous functional gaps, requiring third-parties to address)…
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