I must wonder whether this ultimately speaks poorly for the b2b sector as a whole. Granted icge has been on the cutting edge (positively and negatively) of valuations. And granted, vert's model may be flawed, in some folks' views. But given the times and the multiples, arba's, cmrc's, and ppro's multiples may not be far behind. Heaven forbid, William!
No... I don't think so... to synopsize, in the beginning b2b was just about putting purchasing schedules on the web, and creating a glitzy site with good search capabilities to help a purchaser navigate around. I'm not trying to discount that functionality because that in itself was a huge production increase for a purchasing manager (can you imagine the old way of having to call a rep just to get a price quote?). So icge with their portfolio of a whole bunch of b2b "vertical portals" and then the ultimate manifestation of that, VERT, was a great bet.
But then it became clear that online purchasing was not enough and the supply chain/logistics and online purchasing schedules morphed. The Ariba and C1 buy-sites (online purchasing schedules) were doing great but they were cheap and commoditizable. To do the sell side you had to be a software company and as I mentioned to Glenn once, Vert and the icge army has no chance of achieving software company status in logistics - Its just too hard, not enough people know how to do it etc and it really is a "gorilla game" with all the formatting and interfaces involved.
So icge is out of the loop, I wouldn't touch vert myself. Manu and itwo are good companies as is cmrc etc.
PPRO is a different animal, they are succeeding in hosting, a kindof morph of exds and an ASP. Hosting is really their claim to fame, not b2b software, imo |
