More Than Tech

SAP has paid $8B for Qualtrics. That's a massive investment and one of the highest value acquisitions for a cloud software provider. What is Qualtrics? Qualtrics is the market leader in  "experience management" (EM), which is basically feedback, think of customer feedback, end user feedback, product feedback, etc. Experience (feedback) has become so central to our lives today, just think about Google reviews, Amazon reviews, Yelp reviews and just think of the reviews and surveys you get exposed to in every day life. I get sent surveys every time I fly, rent a car or even when I call my ISP customer support.  Although I'm no expert on the EX market, my experience as a consumer tells me that companies are spending a great deal of money and effort to gather this data. That said, I'm not convinced that they are always taking full advantage of the EX data they are gathering.  From qualtrics.com: Over 10,000 enterprises worldwide, including more than 75 pe...

E-Procurement solutions have been widely available for almost 20 years now and we have seen them develop significantly A Little History In the late 90’s the indirect purchasing model was not supported by systems. Typically, there would be contracts and preferred suppliers, but it was very difficult to prevent maverick spend and non-compliance with policy. It was the early days of the internet and one of the early internet (or intranet) scenarios was to use a simplified browser-based interface to create purchase requisitions by selecting items from a more user-friendly list of items, which quickly became catalogues. The objective was to digitize the old paper based requisitioning system and drive compliance through an interface that the infrequent user could easily navigate. The interface was intended to require little training and to have a reduced set of functionalities to support very basic purchasing. Quickly after this, we saw the emergence of true e-procurement solut...