The response to my April 11th post, Initial Questions Regarding Spend Matters SolutionMap has been interesting, to say the least.
To start, I have appreciated the openness of Azul Partners VP of Marketing Carina Kuhl to provide me with information – including the E-Procurement SolutionMap PRO articles that are only available to subscribers, to help me to better understand their service offering.
What I did not expect, however, was the reaction from some members of the vendor community.
“I just saw your piece on the Solution Map. They don’t mention our company, for which we’re rather grateful, rather than sore at, because we think most stuff coming out of Spend Matters is poor. The ‘News’ is repackaged press releases by their favoured vendors, and Jason’s ‘analysis’ is consistently irrelevant in the real world.
The thing about “e”procurement is that it is all about procurement and about the easiest way to create and maintain commercial relationships, not about technology. Jason in particular has never understood that.”
Requesting anonymity perhaps out of concern for reprisals of some sort, the above is not an isolated sentiment.
Even some industry pundits have suggested that SolutionMap is another Magic Quadrant just with a different name.
Given the above, I again reached out to Carina, who provided the following response;
“I imagine that if this vendor participates, they would be better informed of the RFI process and their ‘perception’ of SolutionMap would be different . . . Finally, anyone with questions regarding SolutionMap is invited to join the deep-dive and Q&A webinar with the Spend Matters’ analyst team on May 4th at Noon CT.”
You can register for the webinar through the following link:
What is clear, is that it better be one terrific webinar because you only get one chance to make a good first impression.
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Procurement Insights 
Carina Kuhl
April 24, 2017
Hi Jon – May I add one more thing, please?
Although this first release of the P2P/I2P/E-Procurement SolutionMap features a total of 16 solution vendors, any vendor can request to participate in the RFI process – and now is the time to enroll to participate for the Q3 release:
1. Create a free listing in Spend Matters’ vendor directory ‘Almanac’ (http://spendmatters.com/almanac/listing)
2. Add your name to the RFI recipients list (https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdqMoksbtmi54FOoIklFNerWOhKztSvWKyzNRaf9VUg7XNwLQ/viewform?c=0&w=1)
The more provider participants, the more comprehensive the SolutionMap – I think there is no downside to that for the procurement and supply chain industry.
Thanks,
Carina
Peri
October 18, 2017
I have been following Spend analysis tools for 2 decades and I can say with 200% confidence that the recent SolutionMap Q4 release has not captured the market even close to truth. Particularly the first and most important of the factors is, ability to get accuracy best in spend tool, which has least mention in the RFI, Survey, Scoring and even mentioned in the report.