Ardent Partners’ Technology Round-Up Series returns today with fresh supply management technology news and updates covering a few major announcements from 2022. If you are a solution provider in the spaces we cover , we’d love to hear from you. Please drop us a note at info at cporising dot com. Thanks, and enjoy!
Coupa’s Launches New T&E Solution for Business Travel
SAN MATEO, Calif., February 15, 2022 – Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), today launched Coupa Travel and Expense, a fully unified solution that transforms traveler experience and delivers real-time travel spend optimization. The new T&E solution is the latest expansion to Coupa’s Business Spend Management suite. In its press release, Coupa touts three key differentiators:
“(1) User-Centric Experience: User-friendly design accelerates adoption while reducing program management headaches and eliminating the need for travelers to book off-channel. (2) Unified T&E Management: Comprehensive T&E management leverages a single, seamless solution that eliminates silos and optimizes every dollar spent by integrating across the BSM platform. (3) Community-Driven Insights: AI-powered insights from Coupa’s $3T+ of anonymized global community spend data provide intelligent travel prescriptions, savings opportunities, and business benchmarks.”
Read the full announcement here.
Esker to Acquire Majority Stake in Market Dojo
LYON, France, and MIDDLETON, Wis. — January 5, 2022 — Esker, a global cloud platform and leader in AI-driven process automation solutions for finance and customer service functions, today announced that it has reached an agreement with the shareholders of Market Dojo Limited, a UK-based eProcurement software company. The agreement states that Esker will acquire 50.1% of the shares and voting rights in the company effective Q1 2022 and the remainder of Market Dojo shares after a period of four years.
Here’s what I said regarding the announcement at the time:
“Ardent Partners research has shown that more finance and procurement executives prefer to make holistic, suite-level investments instead of managing a series of one-off solution providers,” said Andrew Bartolini, Founder and Chief Research Officer at Ardent Partners. “Given that, it makes great sense for a best-in-class ePayables provider like Esker to extend their offering with the acquisition of Market Dojo.”
Read the full announcement here.
Coupa’s Launches New Community.ai to Leverage “Big Data” for Customers
SAN MATEO, Calif., February 2, 2022 – Coupa Software (NASDAQ: COUP), a leader in Business Spend Management (BSM), today launched a set of next-gen spend management innovations under the umbrella of Community.ai. Coupa combines the power of data-driven artificial intelligence with person-to-person connections to transform B2B communities and how buyers and sellers interact.
This is exciting “Big Data” News as the new ‘community’ will utilize Coupa’s proprietary artificial intelligence to aggregate anonymized user and transactional data to present intelligence that helps organizations discover deeper insights, make better decisions, and support mutual success.
Read the full announcement here.
Simfoni Acquires EC Sourcing Group
January 9, 2022
Simfoni – a leading digital procurement vendor announced that it has finalized its acquisition of EC Sourcing Group, a prominent eSourcing solution provider in a move that combines Simfoni’s Spend Intelligence solution and EC Sourcing Group’s eSourcing platform. This move will enable teh combined entity to offer a broader strtaegic sourcing suite with unified data integration.
Ardent Partners has been a big fan of the EC Sourcing Group’s eSourcing solution which offers competitive eRFX, eAuction, and Contract Management features. EC sourcing and its founders have always punched above its weight and we’re excited to see the combined company move up market under the guidance of Simfoni’s well-versed, highly-capable, pragmatic and just plain smart CEO team.
Read the full announcement here.