GLOBAL 2000 LEADERS SHIFT INTO OVERDRIVE AT EMPTORIS USER CONFERENCE

Leading Companies Focus on Driving Adoption to Capture Next Wave of Value From Supply and Contract Management Software

Emptoris Announces New Solution Upgrades To Drive Global Adoption

Burlington, MA – October 6, 2006 – Emptoris, Inc., the leading provider of supply and contract management software, today announced that more than 250 executives and practitioners from leading Global 2000 companies have gathered at the Emptoris Empower 2006 user conference at the Seaport World Trade Center in Boston. The executives from leading Global 2000 companies gathered to discuss best practices in driving adoption enterprise wide to achieve the next wave of value in supply and contract management.

During the conference, Emptoris announced the availability of two new solution offerings designed to help these companies further drive adoption: Global Language Support and Event Monitoring and Support. Emptoris also highlighted data that showed the value Global 2000 companies have achieved with supply and contract management – as well as the potential additional value that can be achieved with 80% to 90% adoption rates, as demonstrated by the market’s leading performers. The company also unveiled new survey data from Emptoris, ISM and SAP Insider, which shows that the success of these leaders has led to a significant new wave of Global 2000 companies planning to adopt solutions in 2007.

Emptoris Empower 2006 Highlights
At the Emptoris Empower 2006 event, the company’s fifth annual user conference, case study and best practices presentations were given by senior executives from more than a dozen Global 2000 companies, including ConocoPhillips, GlaxoSmithKline and UnitedHealthcare. Presentations were also provided by IBM and Accenture, the Emptoris partners that were the primary co-sponsors of the conference.

Executives also participated in four educational tracks dedicated to spend analysis, sourcing, contract management and supplier performance management. The primary focus of the sessions was driving adoption to high-performance levels.

“The front-line leaders in this field are long past implementation issues and are looking to expand and accelerate their early success and value,” said Avner Schneur, President and CEO of Emptoris. “Front-line leaders are now looking to reach maximum adoption across their global enterprises. With wide-scale adoption companies can analyze even more spend, manage even more contracts and execute even more sourcing events globally, all of which translates into even more bottom line value.”

New Program: Overdrive for Adoption
At the user conference, Emptoris provided details on its new Overdrive Program, a comprehensive program designed to drive successful adoption. The Emptoris Overdrive Program incorporates three major elements:

Solutions for advanced program and project reporting and analysis
Benchmarking which provides capability and results assessments
Community-based content where customers can share best practices

Early results of the Emptoris Overdrive Program demonstrate customers can achieve significant improvement in adoption. One global Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) company that employed the program reported significant increase in end user willingness to use solutions more frequently, across more commodities and with higher value and volume items. In six months, the end-users at the company showed:

43% improvement in the ability to perform sourcing activities more efficiently
23% improvement in the ability to source more categories
37% improvement in the increased value and volume of items sourced
25% improvement in the use of the solutions daily

“First by implementing innovative software solutions, then by focusing on driving adoption, our customers are driving higher savings and greater business impact,” said Schneur.

New Offerings to Drive Adoption
Emptoris also announced the availability of two new offerings at the conference: Global Language Support and Event Monitoring and Support.

“Our Global 2000 customer base demands global solutions to drive adoption,” said Schneur. “We recognized their need – and saw how these solutions would help accelerate adoption and value, so we worked around the clock to make these new solutions available.”

Emptoris’ customer support already provides 24 x 7 support 365 days per year via the web, email and telephone. The new Global Local Language Support offering expands this support to all end users and suppliers with real-time product and technical support in ten languages during regular local business hours. With the Global Language Support Offering, customers can expand the adoption of their solutions to a larger number of end users and suppliers.

The Emptoris Event Monitoring and Support offering ensures successful execution of sourcing events for global customers by providing event-based operational support. This offering includes event set up review, supplier training, auction monitoring services and real-time buyer and supplier bidding support during sourcing events. The solution is offered in ten languages to ensure global coverage. By reducing the effort required for sourcing event training and monitoring, customers now have a way to scale deployment rapidly.

Survey Shows Demand for Supply and Contract Management Solutions
At the conference, Emptoris also released the results from a survey conducted with the Institute for Supply Management, which shows that companies still struggle with an array of challenges in analyzing spend, reducing costs, and managing spend and contracts.

Poor data quality - 56% of respondents to the Emptoris - ISM survey indicated that poor data quality and incomplete data are the number one challenge their company faces with spend analysis.
Value analysis and resource constraints - one-third (33%) of respondents said that balancing price savings with other business factors was their biggest challenge to reducing costs – while 23% reported a lack of resources to manage sourcing events was their major challenge.
Limited contract visibility - Half (50%) of respondents said that their transactional systems do not fully reflect current contract terms and conditions.

At Emptoris Empower 2006, leading Global 2000 companies provided case studies on how they uses Emptoris spend analysis, sourcing, contract management and other solutions to overcome these challenges.

In a separate study Emptoris released, this conducted with SAP Insider magazine, fifty-five (55%) percent of respondents said they were considering an investment in a supply or contract management solution in 2007. In fact, most respondents indicated they were considering multiple solutions.

Of companies considering an investment in an SAP partner solution, 73% are considering contract management, 57% are considering sourcing, 55% are considering supplier performance management and 48% are considering spend analysis.
86% of respondents listed that having an SAP NetWeaver partner eco-system is important or very important to their company's technology strategy.

Emptoris also reported that its solutions have been used to analyze over $8 trillion in spend, to source over $164 billion in goods and services, to manage over $65 billion in contracts and to identify an estimated $22 billion in savings for its customers in the past year.

Emptoris received further independent validation of the value its solutions deliver when the company was inducted by INFORMS into the “Optimization Hall of Fame,” the Franz Edelman Academy, for helping Motorola save more than $600 million in an 18 month period using Emptoris solutions.

Emptoris Has Shifted Into Overdrive
More than twice as many customers attended Emptoris Empower 2006 as had attended in previous years, with 25% coming from internationally-based operations, reflecting the growth of the company and the impact its solutions are having within global enterprises.

“By helping our customers succeed, Emptoris has really shifted into overdrive as well,” said Schneur.

During 2006, Emptoris released the Emptoris 6 solution suite with a new compliance solution and a significantly enhanced contract management solution. The Emptoris contract management solution was ranked #1 for current offering in the Forrester Wave Contract Lifecycle Management Suite (Q1 2006) – and company’s sourcing solution was also ranked #1 for current offering in the Forrester Wave Esourcing Suite.

The company also released its SAP integration package and unveiled the Emptoris Overdrive program. Earlier in the year, Emptoris completed the acquisition of diCarta, the leading contract management solution provider.

In 2006, the company experienced 68% growth in sales and increased its world-wide staff to more than 400 persons. Currently, the company has more than 40 open positions advertised for software developers and professional staff.

About Emptoris
Emptoris is the world leader in innovative supply and contract management software solutions that empower enterprises to realize best value and accelerate profitable growth. Emptoris solutions are used by successful Global 2000 companies in every industry. Customers include American Express, Boeing, ConocoPhillips, Dow Corning, GlaxoSmithKline, Motorola, and UnitedHealthcare.

# # #

back to press releases