Complexity is the name of the game in today’s globalized, interconnected business world. Who companies are connected to and how you communicate and collaborate matters more than ever. This means that whether you’re a Fortune 50 manufacturer or a Global 2000 CPG firm, you need to pay your suppliers in a reasonable timeframe. There are several ways to make this happen, but one of the most advanced is called a business network.
Nipendo, an Israel-based company, provides just such a network. In particular, the Nipendo Supplier Cloud automates the procure-to-pay (P2P) process through its cloud-based platform that allows buyers and suppliers to submit, process, and pay invoices through the same portal by connecting directly machine to machine, or via a cloud-based printer. This is all done with the goal of connecting buyers and their suppliers in such a way to allow their eInvoicing capabilities to keep up with the speed of business.
The Foundation
CEO Eyal Rosenberg and CTO Alon Rosenberg co-founded the company in 2007 with the goal of connecting businesses to their suppliers in a seamless, paperless, and frictionless manner. Seven years later, Nipendo boasts thousands of suppliers on their platform and a plug-and-play solution that avoids the hassle of custom coding and long implementations.
Nipendo’s long focus on the P2P market has led to insights into what the line-of-business user cares about and prioritizes. As Nipendo VP of Marketing Eran Livneh noted to us recently, Nipendo sees most companies focus on managing specific P2P activities rather than taking a more comprehensive approach to the area. Rather than looking at P2P as a holistic issue, he said, companies have tended to look for different solutions to the different problems and sub-processes that exist across P2P: indirect PO generation gets one provider, direct gets another, and invoicing is an entirely different consideration altogether. Nipendo seeks to provide that more holistic P2P solution that allows for everything to happen within the same platform. But how?
Where Nipendo Fits In
Nipendo Supplier Cloud, like many business networks, has as its premise the connection of buyers and suppliers. The basic thought is that if you can connect companies on both sides of the accounts payable equation via the same system, you can move more quickly to straight-through processing, which limits human interaction and errors and allows for fewer full-time accounts payable staff to process the same–or higher–numbers of invoices.
Nipendo is intriguing because of its plug-and-play nature. Some companies, according to Livneh, look at Nipendo as a way to augment their current EDI programs, while others (including some high-tech clients) view the Nipendo solution as a way to leapfrog EDI all together.
According to CEO Rosenberg, Nipendo’s ultimate goal is to become the best-of-breed P2P solution in the marketplace and Nipendo has taken a partnership approach in the near-term to get there, enhancing its solution footprint through a number of strategic partnerships. A few months ago, we wrote about one such deal with Integrate Financial. Another is with SynerTrade, which allows Nipendo to actively compete in larger “source-to-settle” suite deals. More broadly, Nipendo sees its solution as a platform that can be used to offer other providers’ solutions or “apps” that can be accessed seamlessly within the Nipendo network (a concept similar to Apple’s App store)
Getting Priorities in Order
About 60% of Nipendo’s revenues goes toward research and development, Rosenberg told us recently. This is critical for the company at large, since Nipendo’s grand vision is to make its Supplier Cloud the P2P platform of choice for end-users and the partner of choice for other technology providers. Investments are being made to make the platform as open as possible so that new partners and new applications can be easily launched and accessed by network participants.
With its open platform, Nipendo prioritizes adding more capabilities through strategic partnerships and its own development, which it believes will enable the momentum of customer and supplier growth to continue. This current size and growth of their network is what makes partnerships so appealing for third parties like SynerTrade which is potentially able to access an entirely new customer base.
Rosenberg is confident in Nipendo’s future; over the second half of the year, he tells us, you can expect to see more partnerships, resulting in more applications embedded in the Nipendo Supplier Cloud. There will also be community growth, and product improvements to the Supplier Cloud itself says Rosenberg. This will make the next six months an interesting time for Nipendo, its customers, and its partners. We’ll be back next time with a review and analysis of Nipendo’s Supplier Cloud.
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