Easy-to-use and quick to deploy spend management.

Unveils Breakthrough Product Innovation to Bring the Online Consumer Shopping Experience to Enterprise Purchasing

Santa Clara, Calif., September 26, 2006 - Ketera, the leading provider of On Demand Spend Management solutions, unveiled today breakthrough product innovations that consumerize the corporate procurement process for the first time in history. Created to bring the online consumer shopping experience to corporate users, the new Ketera Procurement solution and integrated Mercury platform will unlock hidden procurement savings and eliminate maverick spending.

Designed and developed for leading customers to overcome the challenges of user adoption and cumbersome application training, the new Ketera Procurement solution has a consumerized look and feel that′s modeled after the online shopping experience. Ultimately, the solution is designed for complete ease of use so any corporate buyer can point, click and buy items in an online shopping cart while complying with corporate purchasing processes.

The new Ketera Procurement solution requires no user training and includes Web 2.0 technologies such as AJAX to make the user interface more dynamic and easier to use than traditional web-based applications. And because it′s built as an on demand solution, it can be deployed quickly and easily across small to large enterprise organizations, unlocking massive and immediate hard dollar procurement savings for companies of all sizes.

"The single biggest challenge we face today is getting employees to comply with our purchasing processes. If we don′t get full adoption of the system, we leave huge savings on the table because we can′t extract the full value from our negotiated supplier contracts, or get complete visibility into our spend," said Dian Trosclair, VP of Supply Chain Management at ServiceMaster. "Ketera′s new Procurement solution gets to the heart of this problem. They figured out that in order to drive real business value for our company, we need to nail the adoption issue by giving users a corporate buying experience they′re familiar with, and one that requires no training - it simply comes with a two-page user guide for quick reference. Their new solution is really an amazing innovation that will revolutionize the purchasing industry."

Coupled with the new Ketera Procurement solution, the Mercury platform is the latest breakthrough architecture Ketera′s developed to integrate its entire suite of spend management applications via a common data model and shared dashboard feature. The platform displays to front-end users each Ketera solution with a consistent and consumerized user interface, and connects the applications on the back-end via a common data model to process all workflow, user management and supplier management system functions.

Ketera′s new Procurement solution is the first application to be unveiled on the Mercury platform with the new consumerized user interface. Moving forward, Ketera plans to roll out the full suite of consumerized spend management solutions, including Ketera Spend Analysis, Sourcing, Contract Management, Invoicing and Supplier Connect, to customers via the Mercury platform.

"One of the biggest challenges in corporate procurement today centers on low user adoption - there′s a big need to get the employee population at large to adhere to corporate policies and use the procurement application systems in place. The idea of creating a `consumerized´ user interface that′s incredibly familiar and easy to use, requires no user training, and is accessible to all employees is a fundamentally different and better approach to solving this problem," said Gartner Research Director of Procurement Strategies & Systems, Deborah Wilson.

"We′re extremely excited about unveiling our new, and truly innovative, Ketera Procurement and Mercury platform solutions," said Burton M. Goldfield, CEO of Ketera. "During the development of these new products, it was our belief that previous spend management solutions failed to deliver full business value because of a lack of user adoption inside an organization, despite the investment made by the purchasing team."

"We identified this as an ongoing struggle for enterprise companies and believe the key to delivering real business value involves working hand in hand with our customers to innovate solutions that truly solve their challenges," Goldfield continued. "By accepting the realities of maverick buying, and developing products like our new Procurement and Mercury platform solutions, we′re giving our customers exactly what they want - the keys to immediately unlocking substantial savings that are currently hidden inside the procure to pay cycle."

Pricing and Availability

The new version of the Ketera Procurement and Ketera Mercury platform are currently available to all customers. Pricing is available upon request.

 

Next Steps

“ We selected the Ketera eRFX tool because it is quick to implement, cost effective and drives efficiencies into the sourcing process.  Its portal design streamlines the communication, document traffic and analysis associated with conducting our RFPs.  The entire Ketera package has allowed us to run more events with fewer resources, leading to increased procurement efficiencies. ” Michael Feeney Vice President, Corporate Procurement for U.S. Bank

“ When using a hard copy or .pdf system to manage our contracts, Luminex would sometimes miss key milestones. With Ketera Contract management we now have full contract compliance and sufficient advanced warning to take the appropriate actions in a timely fashion.  The Ketera solution also has resulted in huge time savings for us; deciphering language in a contract used to take us hours, now it takes us minutes. ” David Mendoza Director, Strategic Planning and Business Development Group for Luminex

“ We recognized an opportunity to enhance our purchasing process with state–of–the–art technology – without the up–front investment and ongoing resource commitment associated with the implementation of enterprise software. ” Mitch Platt VP Contract Services for Con–way

“ Ketera′s on demand solution is ahead of the competition – we will be able to implement the solution in weeks and we never have to worry about taking the system down to install upgrades or make changes. ” Steve Kenny Vice President Risk Management and General Services for Columbia Credit Union

“ From the beginning, Ketera explained everything to us, both from the technical and sales side. They′ve accommodated our needs and have been very helpful and responsive. ” Michael Kapeles Senior Supply Manager for Cabot Microelectronics

“ Not only does Ketera provide innovative solutions for spend management, they also offer high quality professional services that let you get the most from their solutions. Working with Ketera is like a breath of fresh air. ” Nick Walker Procurement Manager for BTP

“ Ketera's new solution is really an amazing innovation that will revolutionize the purchasing industry. ” Dian Trosclair VP of Supply Chain Management for ServiceMaster

“ Using Ketera, we've lowered our costs and improved our compliance with negotiated corporate contracts. By buying on contract, we typically see a ten percent reduction in cost. ” Jim Cebula Director of Global Purchasing for Kennametal

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