SDCExec.com |

Mountain View, CA  August 20, 2002  MarketMile, the American Express-backed e-procurement services provider, wants to be your low-cost e-procurement provider.

The company today threw down the gauntlet to providers of "behind-the-firewall" enterprise e-procurement solutions, launching what it is calling the first enterprise spend management solution delivered online as a managed Web service in an effort to offer low-cost e-procurement for large and midsize enterprises.

MarketMile also announced it had changed its name to Ketera Technologies.

Ketera, which, as MarketMile, had specialized in online procurement and electronic payment and reconciliation, rolled out new spend analysis and sourcing solutions, building on technologies acquired earlier this year when it bought solution provider Aentropy. Along with a new supplier enablement solution, Ketera is billing the suite of applications as a spend management platform.

The focus on spend management reflects a wider trend in the electronic procurement space, in which providers have moved to position their solutions as being more strategic  focused, with a nod to chief financial officers (CFOs), on controlling spend throughout an enterprise  rather than mere tactical applications for processing transactions. e-Procurement pioneer Ariba late last year began offering what it called an "enterprise spend management solution."

"For too long CFOs and purchasing executives haven't had the tools to effectively control and reduce corporate spending," said Rudy Sahiwal, Ketera's new chief operating officer and former CEO of Aentropy. "Companies lack visibility into corporate spending, they don't have the resources to negotiate improved contracts with suppliers and they don't have the enterprise-wide tools needed to effectively control spending. It's really an unacceptable situation in this day and age."

The newly announced spend management platform from Ketera, Sahiwal continued, addresses those business problems and meets a growing demand for solutions that can provide rapid bottom-line savings without the high cost associated with enterprise software.

Ketera said its Spend Analysis solution, delivered as a managed Web-service, enables companies to conduct an extensive up-front analysis of their baseline spend as the first step in a spend management project. The solution uses what Sahiwal calls "inferencing technology" to automatically cleanse and categorize data, and then it breaks down spending by supplier and category, analyzes spending behaviors across the organization and identifies opportunities for savings.