If BravoSolution were one of your smart kids, it would be the one who could care less about going to Harvard or Yale (or Cambridge or Oxford), but quietly instead opt to head for a school like the University of Chicago or Cal Tech (or Bristol), which few on the planet outside of industry, finance, academic and political leadership knows about, but most certainly should. For a variety of reasons, including the nimble acquisition of VerticalNet that transformed it from a services-driven organization to a hybrid software/services/solution provider, BravoSolution has flown under the radar of many practitioners and advisers in the market.
Yet Bravo’s core capabilities in sourcing, supplier performance and spend analysis make them a viable — and some would argue superior — entity against just about any other vendor in a competitive selection situation. Toss in solid optimization (and optimization services/advanced sourcing capability), not to mention contract and program management, and the package begins to look even more complete. Today, BravoSolution has 22 companies using their entire suite of software capabilities. Yet it has over 189 individual sourcing (tendering, in their vernacular), 41 contract management, 78 vendor management (supplier performance management), 22 program management and 49 spend analysis/visibility deployments.
By our analysis, this puts BravoSolution in the top five largest software providers in the overall sectors where it competes, not counting Oracle and SAP (especially considering the depth of their capabilities in key areas). The numbers, however, only tell part of the story. Spend Matters sat down with BravoSolution earlier this Fall and spent a significant amount of time going through demonstrations and product updates, looking especially at advanced use cases in the area of spend analysis, supplier performance, sourcing data acquisition for complex categories and optimization. In a series of posts looking at some of BravoSolution’s use cases and capabilities in these areas, we’ll hope to give some Spend Matters insights into ways of getting more from sourcing/optimization, spend analysis, supplier performance and related areas…
