While Rearden’s acquisition of Ketera has many implications for the broader P2P and Spend Management market — ranging from an evolving competitive landscape with greater choice of stable vendors for customers to a potential re-integration of P2P with travel and expense management — a key area that we should not overlook is the implications of the deal for Ketera customers and organizations currently in the market for potential P2P solutions. For the most part, Spend Matters believes the acquisition is quite positive for existing customers, for the following reasons:
- Rearden’s scale and backing should guarantee continued support for Ketera’s current and legacy product lines, including those in which sales/adoption had not materialized to levels initially conceived internally
- Given its broader enterprise experience and operational foundation, Rearden should help bring greater structure to enabling Ketera customers to understand the exact costs of doing business with their vendor (e.g., customer/prospect feedback suggests Ketera was not very good at answering the simple question of how much P2P/network enablement would cost given uncertainties over volume, number of suppliers enabled, etc.)
- The added distribution from new sales via Rearden or Rearden’s channels of Ketera’s products should expand the sample size to include the spend analysis and P2P benchmarking that is included in the product set (which helps set the applications apart from others)
- Rearden’s product lines are a very logical complement to existing Ketera solutions that customers may have deployed already
- The integration of Rearden’s web services approach to supplier/partner integration could potentially prove a significant enhancement over existing supplier content/connectivity options, including punch-out. Rearden could actually bring a disruptive UI/user experience approach to how users of indirect catalog buying tools interact with supplier content and data…
