San Francisco, CA, USA
May 10, 2004
Scaling the e-Financial Supply Chain Mountain
Part II of III: A Review of Solution Providers Facilitating
the Ascent
Report Published by Celent
The trek to the electronic summit for B2B
transactions is a long but not impossible one. Celent predicts that
adoption of buyer and seller-driven applications will grow from an
estimated 34% of the top 1000 North American companies in 2004 to 54% by
2008.
In a new report, Scaling the
e-Financial Supply Chain Mountain, Celent examines e-financial
supply chain solutions and their prospects. Celent finds that there are
signs that demand is picking up and that earlier slow adoption reflected
the market’s immaturity, not its irrelevance. Several critical factors
will propel adoption: continued enhancements that improve the value
proposition, financial pressure on companies to become more efficient,
regulations demanding financial transaction transparency and integrity,
and pricing more in line with companies’ cost-value equation.
According to Alenka
Grealish, author of the report and manager of the banking
group at Celent, "In the late 1990s, adoption of an e-invoicing and
e-payables solution was legitimately viewed as entering risky territory,
akin to the first ascent of a mountain. The software was relatively
unproven and vendor viability was in question. Today, with blue chip
companies such as Honeywell, Payless, and Verizon singing praises and
behemoths such as Oracle, SAP, and FDC pursuing market share, e-financial
supply chain solutions are gaining legitimacy and staying power."
Long-run staying power requires a minimum level of
standardization and interfaces across solutions and networks for buyers
and sellers alike. Celent believes that is highly unlikely, however, that
there ever will be a single solution or network. Instead, multiple models
and solutions will co-exist and in-roads into interoperability will be
made. Already, there are budding signs of interconnectivity.
The report compares and contrasts ten vendors:
Avolent, BCE Emergis, Bottomline Technologies, Deutsche Bank, edocs,
Oracle, PowerTrack, SAP, Velosant, and Xign.
A Table
of Contents is available online.
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