Five top vendors have made the cut as market leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the top performing Procure-to-Pay Suites.
The Magic Quadrant paints a picture of the P2P market performance spread across four quadrants: visionaries, niche players, challengers and leaders.
Procurement teams can use the Quadrant to identify and evaluate suitable P2P suite vendors to help them achieve their critical procurement goals. Gartner provides product overviews, strengths and cautions for each vendor listed in the Magic Quadrant.
Coupa took top spot among the front running leaders, closely followed by SAP, with GEP narrowly behind in third. Ivalua made the leader status cut for fourth year in a row, followed by JAGGAER.
The new vendors added to the Magic Quadrant this year included three niche players:
- Corcentric which has featured in past Magic Quadrants, but dropped out last year due to not meeting certain inclusion criteria (specifically number of sales).
- Ebidtopay which met this year’s inclusion criteria
- Synertrade — a past Magic Quadrant vendor, but dropped out last year due to not meeting certain inclusion criteria (specifically number of sales).
Fellow newcomer Microsoft, which earned ‘challenger’ status met the new inclusion criterion of not needing to sell its P2P as a stand-alone solution.
Gartner defines Leaders as being “in the strongest position to influence the market’s growth and direction and demonstrate a market-defining vision of how P2P technology can help procurement leaders achieve business objectives for managing compliance and controlling external spend.”
“Leaders have the Ability to Execute against that vision through products and services, and they have demonstrated business results in the form of revenue and earnings. They excel in their combination of market understanding, innovation, product features and functions, and overall viability,” Gartner said.
See how the vendors stack up
Gartner says there is a trend emerging whereby customers are buying buying P2P as part of a larger S2P investment. It expects this trend to continue as an influencing factor in P2P suite vendor selection.
“P2P solutions are often the cornerstone of a procurement technology strategy,” Gartner said. “However, buyers are increasingly making investment decisions based on a larger S2P vision. S2P suites include analytics, e-sourcing, contract life cycle management and supplier management, as well as P2P. This trend to look at the larger S2P technology landscape is creating a bias toward P2P vendor selections that support the entire S2P process, even if the customer ends up buying non-P2P components from other vendors.”
Gartner said midmarket adoption is “expanding beyond fragmented point solutions to full-suite adoption” and continues to grow among organisations which are following the adoption trends of larger enterprises.
