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Today, we released our inaugural Forrester Wave evaluation of B2B commerce suites. In a sister blog post, my colleague Andy Hoar, with whom I coauthored this report, explains why client demand for this research has exploded over the past...
Excerpts from both posts...
To differentiate the wannabes from the bona fide leaders, Forrester rejigged its established B2C commerce suite scoring criteria to emphasize:
--> B2B commerce features. We added all-new criteria to evaluate how these solutions solve unique B2B problems, such as quotes; complex pricing lists; eProcurement; product configuration and customization; guided selling; bulk order entry; dealer management; and account, contract, and budget management, to name a few.
--> PIM, WCM, and OMS capabilities. B2B clients tell us that they need product information management (PIM) to provide a single system of record and governance around large part lists and product catalogs; they want web content management (WCM) to manage the large volumes of unstructured marketing content that augment and often completely eclipse the transactional part of an enterprise website; and they require order management systems (OMS) to orchestrate the complex life cycle that B2B orders go through — from quote to approval to submission to manufacture to distribution and delivery.
What’s at stake overall for B2B companies is no less than a piece of the $559 billion US B2B eCommerce market. To earn a share, B2B eBusiness and channel strategy professionals at all levels of maturity require a world-class B2B commerce suite that:
--> Offers a customer experience standard comparable to leading B2C sites.
--> Addresses the growing influence that mobile is having in the workplace.
--> Makes the business case for sustained investment.
The High-Level Findings From Our Evaluation:
--> IBM, hybris (an SAP company), Oracle Commerce, and Intershop lead the pack. IBM leads with robust B2B commerce, order management, and CPQ capabilities but lacks aligned WCM and PIM capabilities. We found that hybris brings robust B2B commerce, PIM, and maturing WCM and order management capabilities to the table, all based on a modern architecture stack; however, the feature set still lags behind the robustness of IBM's offering. Oracle Commerce, on the other hand, brings robust B2B commerce, merchandizing, and WCM capabilities to the table but lacks aligned PIM and order management capabilities. Intershop comes to market with a much-improved platform that is catching up with the market leaders; however, some of the robust B2B functionality that exists in Intershop’s legacy product (Enfinity Suite) has yet to be ported to the new v7 platform.
--> Insite Software and NetSuite offer competitive options. Each of these vendors offers unique B2B commerce capabilities for clients. Insite Software offers a lightweight solution that is well suited as the commerce “front end” to an existing enterprise ERP installation. NetSuite’s solution is unique in that it is the only multitenant SaaS solution evaluated here — and the only solution that wraps commerce, ERP, and CRM into a single architecture and solution set. The product is, however, targeted largely at midmarket firms — enterprise organizations will find the overlap with their existing ERP and CRM infrastructure redundant and therefore an unnecessary investment.
--> Commerceserver.net lags behind. Commerceserver.net is in the midst of a rebirth, but these are early days and the solution has many gaps that leave it far behind the leaders.
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Via Marteq
This post is a blend of this article and the noted sister piece. And the sister piece is located here.
The monolithic systems are obviously appropriate for the monolithic companies: large, diversified B2B competitors whose backend systems are sophisticated and complex. Shortly, we'll see other offerings on the same level as NetSuite (and I'm certain as a part of SFDC).