The Expanded Icertis-SAP Partnership is a Historic Milestone for Both Companies
In May of last year, I joined Icertis after 16 years at SAP. It wasn't an easy decision to leave SAP, but I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to join the Icertis rocket ship as they transformed the foundation of commerce through contract intelligence.
It's been a year of amazing growth and learning for me (and Icertis), and one of those learnings is that you never really know where a rocket ship will take you! As it turns out, my "goodbye" to SAP was much more of a "see you soon!," as became clear when SAP and Icertis announced an expanded partnership earlier this year. This unique partnership draws these two premier organizations closer so we can deliver more value to our customers via a joint product roadmap and deeper integrations that will have touchpoints across the intelligent enterprise.
I might be biased, but I consider this a pivotal moment for the CLM category. Here’s why.
Contracts define who a company does business with and on what terms. For more than a decade, Icertis has dedicated itself to enabling companies to ensure that the full intent of every contract is correctly memorialized and fully realized. From the beginning, our founders, Samir and Monish, recognized that the power of contract data is fully unleashed when it's connected to operational systems.
This has never been done before – contracts are mostly word-based documents, and the nuances of their intent are captured in turns of phrase and legal clauses. Data, meanwhile, is generally thought of as values organized in rows and columns. Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI), our AI-driven platform, turns the natural language content in contracts into structured data that can be managed and analyzed at scale. Structured contract data can also be connected to systems that operationalize key business processes, so we can measure and monitor how or whether those agreements are fulfilled – ultimately, giving companies the insights they need to run at their best.
This vision has been proven out repeatedly through analyst accolades, resounding customer success, and recognition by SAP itself!
While I was still at SAP Ariba, the ICI for SAP Ariba and ICI for SAP CPQ solutions were first listed on the SAP Store as Spotlight Apps. Within a year of these listings, these solutions had some of the highest numbers of transactions on the SAP Store—indeed, their strong performance contributed to the SAP store's overall success in 2021. This performance earned Icertis the Partner of the Year – SAP Store (Validated and Spotlight) at the SAP Pinnacle Awards 2021! Talk about validation.
And with our expanded partnership with SAP, we're taking things to a whole different level. While our first set of solutions initially focused on Procurement and Sales, our integrations will soon have multiple touchpoints to SAP systems across ERP, finance, procurement, sales, and HR. With ICI integrated seamlessly into SAP systems, enterprises will be empowered to more easily and effectively deploy Icertis' market-leading contract intelligence innovations while managing core business processes with SAP solutions. SAP and Icertis share a common vision that CLM is now the 5th system of record in the intelligent enterprise and will work together to ensure SAP customers benefit from Icertis' industry-defining enterprise CLM capabilities around intelligent contract authoring, automation, and insights. And with this shared vision, we are ready to transform the foundation of commerce for our customers.
If you would like to learn more about Icertis and SAP's shared vision for contracts in the intelligence enterprise, check out this article from SpendMatters: SAP-Icertis Partnership Analysis: A Spend Matters Report.