05 Nov 2014 A blast from the past – a not so new new-entrant in the spend management space
Like buses, you wait for one for ages then two come at once. It was only a few weeks ago I was speaking to Perfect Commerce – a rebranding of one of the great names of the past, CommerceOne – and this week I had the great pleasure to speak with Deem – one of the other greats.
You’d be forgiven for not recognizing the name. Deem is a re-branding of a product that many will be familiar with – Ketera. Deem acquired Ketera in 2010 and today they’re announcing what is in effect a relaunch. In their words “Deem Spend has been re-branded, refreshed and revitalized to automate entire sourcing processes and maximizes savings for our customers on every transaction”.
I kicked the tyres on their product suite earlier this week – not a detailed review but enough to be impressed. For me the product suites strengths are:
1. Maturity – Deem is built on Ketera
2. Comprehensive – contract management, travel and indirect procurement (with some very interesting direct procurement tools in the pipeline), expense management and spend analytics
3. Current – Deem doesn’t have mobile as an add-on. It is designed for mobile. Desktop is the add-on
But I’m going to leave it to Jason Busch from Spend Matters to summarize: “Deem Spend is not a new product,” he says “As a customer of this solution from years ago, I can attest to how it is still relevant in the market based on today’s needs. The re-introduction of an updated and enhanced version of Deem Spend is adding another worthy competitor to the current market.”
Deem Spend is built from Ketera, a leading SaaS based spend management solutions provider that Deem acquired in 2010. Now available on Deem’s world-class Commerce-as-a-service platform, Deem Spend includes four modules:
- Deem Spend Analytics – Deem Spend Analytics boasts patented technology that achieves the highest cleansing rate in the industry.
- Deem Contract Management – End-to-end contract lifecycle management that enables authoring in addition to repository for end-to-end contract management.
- Deem Sourcing – E-sourcing tool that incorporates extensive, industry-specific expertise and best practices in pre-built templates.
- Deem Supplier Enablement – Supplier and catalog management that is compatible with any e-procurement system and empowers suppliers to manage their own content, saving valuable time and resources.
“With the launch of Deem Spend, we are introducing the only fully integrated suite of travel, expense and spend solutions,” said Patrick Grady, founder and CEO, Deem. “While leading procurement vendors have halted innovation because they believe the market and technologies as mature, at Deem we are pioneering a revolution in the way companies source, spend and save.”
The press release accompanying their launch today describes Deem as “The only integrated cloud suite of travel, expense and procurement applications.” It goes on: “Deem enables companies to purchase virtually any product or service in context of corporate policy, the role of the employee and negotiated discounts, resulting in savings on every transaction.
“Cloud-based and mobile-ready, Deem Spend comes enabled with out of the box content across the Deem portfolio and is designed for instant deployment and rapid adoption in organizations of all sizes. Deem combines its market-leading suite with the industry’s most comprehensive B2B commerce network and a mobile-first consumer experience to deliver the industry’s highest adoption and savings rates.”
For more information, please visit https://www.deem.com/spend.
I’m looking forward to understanding the Deem product set in more detail in the coming months.
Pete Loughlin can be found on twitter @peteloughlin
