CyBiz E-Procurement Solution Available As Service Or Software

In the summer of 2000, Matria Healthcare went live with an e-procurement system designed to streamline acquisition of IT hardware and software. Some 14 months later, the Marietta, Ga.-based health-care firm estimates that it has shaved hundreds of thousands of dollars from its IT budget.

E-procurement is quietly reaping benefits for growing numbers of adherents. CyBiz, based here, is taking on the likes of Ariba and Commerce One with its e-procurement solution, which is available as enterprise software or a hosted service.

CyBiz undertakes joint marketing events with channel partners to solicit new business and shares qualified leads.

"Our goal is to go 100 percent through the channel," said Mitch Ferro, vice president of product management for CyBiz. "We want to enable channel partners to offer solutions on a hosted basis, or to resell our software."

The company undertakes joint marketing events with channel partners to solicit new business and shares qualified leads, Ferro said.

The roots of the founders of the three-year-old company are in "the IT distribution space. They would place people in purchasing departments, so they saw the pain from the buyer's side. They themselves dealt with the pain of sourcing from upstream manufacturers," Ferro said.

Consequently, CyBiz solutions,whether hosted or run within the four walls of an enterprise,cover "the whole demand and distribution chain," Ferro said.

For Matria, hosted e-procurement was the best way to sample the technology. It worked with solution provider Syscom Technologies, also in Marietta, to use a hosted edition of the CyBiz platform.

While IT professionals are typically among the first to realize the benefits of e-procurement, "there is nothing that stops Matria from enabling a bandage supplier or any other supplier" from joining the CyBiz network, said John Sapone, vice president of sales at 21-year-old Syscom.

Thomas Morning, Matria's manager of support services, said his company's upper management has taken notice of the fact that "e-procurement has definitely speeded up our purchasing."

Morning said he can now allocate half of one full-time employee's time to checking inventory or performing other tasks, since digitally procuring PCs and software frees up hours otherwise spent tackling sourcing and other procurement-related tasks.

Other savings have come in the form of discounts from suppliers for orders of a certain size, and from a reduction in "maverick buying," where employees purchase IT gear from a local retailer instead of a preferred supplier, often at a worse price.

Morning said the CyBiz solution could be applicable to other parts of Matria's business.

Taking a different tack than Syscom is another CyBiz partner, Lockheed Martin Global Telecommunications (LMGT).

Dalton Pont, senior manager of business development at Bethesda, Md.-based LMGT's enterprise solutions unit, said the group is developing a hosted e-business service for commercial clients that incorporates CyBiz's e-procurement technology.

Microsoft's .Net platform "is the basis of the [forthcoming] service offering," Pont said. Other pieces of technology will come from ISVs such as OpenText and PTC, he said.

Pricing for the as-yet-unnamed service will likely include a monthly access fee as well as user and transaction fees, Pont said.

"[By design], we came to the market later than a lot of folks did," Pont said. The company has learned lessons from moves made by some of the early players in the MSP space, he added.

Pont declined to identify the clients that LMGT has lined up but said that most of them were outsourcing e-business functions for the first time.