“I believe the phrase “spend intelligence” to be misleading. To me, it sounds like a new take or sub-segment of business intelligence software applications which offer analytics and dashboard capabilities and sit on top of existing systems of record. The problem is that spend visibility and analytics is much more complex, requiring data cleansing, rationalization, classification and other efforts which go far beyond what is needed to gain insight into basic HR, financials, IT and other internal information, which fall cleanly in to the BI camp.”
Compare the above rantings of an industry expert with the following headline from the October 12th, 2010 press release from Rosslyn Analytics which proclaims that “RA.Pid® Self Service enables customers to see every detail of their spend in five minutes” and “RA.Pid® re-sets industry’s average cost of acquiring spend visibility from $75,000 to $99.”
Why claims such as the ones being made in the Rosslyn press release would have led to catcalls and accusations of heresy by mainstream pundits who expressing similar opinions to the one referenced in the italicized opening paragraph, would refer to such assertions as being Madison Avenue Botox.
In reality, and as outlined in my January 27th post titled “Rosslyn Analytics Adaptive Intelligence Reflects Scientific Principles,” such claims are not only legitimate, but have to a certain extent been long overdue.
The fact remains that back in 2000, a white paper titled “Strategic Backgrounder: Software as a Service” by the Software & Information Industry Association’s (SIIA) eBusiness Division pretty much predicted this tipping point transformation.
While the SIIA hedged their bets by stating that “due to technical and business issues, such drastic predictions had not yet happened,” they nonetheless fired what I had referred to as a first flare indicating that a change was definitely on the horizon.
The change of course to which they were referring was that “packaged desktop and enterprise applications will soon be swept away by the tide of Web-based, outsourced products and services,” and that the advent of the SaaS or on-demand model would ultimately “remove the responsibility for installation, maintenance and upgrades (and the associated heavy costs) from over-burdened MIS staff.”
Today, you can now see how Rosslyn’s non-consultancy approach and commitment to customer service aligns with the emerging reality of SaaS-based technology. In fact, at both conferences in which I was a speaker these past two weeks , the reference to a non-consultancy approach was bantered about with incredible frequency.
In the end, and like the first inklings of light for a new day, Rosslyn is at the crest of a new wave that will forever change the industry landscape. This should also make for a great interview with Rosslyn CEO Charles Clark on the PI Window on Business October 18th at 11:00 AM EST.
30
Procurement Insights 
Posted on October 14, 2010
0