Embark On Your Procurement Digitization Journey with Raindrop

Every company invests in technology solutions to support their Revenue organization. CRM software is ubiquitous, and there are countless solutions on the market today focused on marketing, selling, and servicing the customer. Unsurprisingly, when it comes to the money coming into your company, the software market supporting this function is fully mature. But like every deal, there are two sides to the table, and historically, only the Revenue side, not the Buying side, has had all of the necessary and integrated tools at their disposal. The gap in this crossroads is exactly where we found a Santa Clara based Enterprise Spend Management platform company named Raindrop, the most exciting new solution we’ve seen when it comes to managing the outflow of money.

While most companies generally have at least half a dozen or more different pieces of technology stitched together to track the money flowing out of their company, these “point solutions” are unfortunately not usually well integrated, capable of talking to each other, are expensive, require numerous internal and external resources to maintain, and require downtime to upgrade.

When we reached out to Raindrop during our interview, they started off at the beginning of their customer-facing process. In order to gain a sense of how Raindrop can make a positive impact on your organization, they begin by asking the customer several basic questions around their supplier spend management, such as, how do you onboard your suppliers, how do you manage the risk, what contracts are executed with these suppliers, how much has been consumed, and for that consumption, how much have you paid. As you can see, the answer may not be easy to find, as most companies have to navigate across multiple systems, causing a fundamental issue causing spend leakage. In simple words, what Raindrop is asking, does your company have a 360-degree view of your external supplier spend? Raindrop enables you to have this complete supplier 360-degree view in a “single pane of glass”. Also, it has the frameworks and intelligence built in to perform the spend reduction activities and provide cost savings. Raindrop delivers a completely unified system with a clean, modern, frictionless, and integrated user experience which caters to global needs in terms of Security, currencies, and language requirements.

Raindrop provides Spend Analytics, Spend Planning, Supplier Relationship Management, Sourcing (RFx and Reverse Auctions), Contract Lifecycle Management, and the downstream functions of purchase orders, invoices, and all the way back through the renewal cycle via what Raindrop refers to as an automated “call to action”. Basically, what The Silicon Review learned during our discussion with Raindrop is, instead of data silos across multiple products, Raindrop’s frictionless integration and user experience ensures your company is provided a unified view of spend, and can drive specific actions to maximize the value of your investments. Raindrop ties together all of the technologies required for effective spend management, into a “single pane of glass” easy-to-use platform. Or to borrow Raindrop’s own slogan, “you do your business your way”.

Raindrop also uses a rapid development methodology, so when a customer requires certain features and functionality, it can be put into the development roadmap and into live Production into impressively short timelines. There seems to be this ability which we’re simply not seeing from the established industry set.

Speaking of providing rapid value, we learned Raindrop is the only Enterprise Spend Management solution where a full Production instance can be downloaded for free. This is a huge industry game-changing feature, because the ability to immediately gain access to value is entirely unheard of in their industry. Gone are the days of million-dollar custom implementations which take six months from expensive third-party implementation consulting firms. When we went to www.raindrop.com, typed in our name and email address, and immediately received a fully-usable Production instance which was able to run our own company’s spend management, it was revolutionary. In an industry full of established, older technology which takes real time and money to deploy, this immediate attainment of value was shockingly impressive.

That said, Raindrop is also more than an Enterprise Spend Management platform company. Their professional services team currently manages billions of dollars of their customers corporate spend for a wide-variety of goods and services, with a particular focus on technology provider scope across hardware, software, and services. This volume and negotiation power enables Raindrop to be a cost savings machine for their customers.

Going back to our interview with Raindrop, we learned in Spend Management, it’s all about the reduction of dollars and cost containment. With Raindrop, their customers get the best of the technology, as well as the services, to achieve their customer cost reduction targets. Raindrop’s technology enables them to identify the areas where to save, and their services helps to deliver on those hidden gems. When we asked Raindrop to quantify their cost reduction value, we were informed Raindrop has seen a reduction in baseline spend in the range of 9% to 12%, and at times, significantly more. Even the typical cycle time reduction to acquire or renew technologies is an impressive 35 – 43%. But what might be most impressive is their experience in having overall Procurement fulfillment costs drop by as much as 42%. When process automation is responsible for such a high degree of efficiencies, then call us highly impressed.

In short, Raindrop is a self-funding technology which increases corporate operating margins by cost savings and cost containment, increasing compliance, proactively addressing contract renewals as well as asset consumption, all while returning money back into your company’s pockets.

Raindrop earns our praise as a disrupter in an industry ready for change. The bottom line is, if you’re looking for a fully-integrated platform, which can integrate into other parts of your existing technology architecture (think ERP with SAP, Oracle, NetSuite, Dynamics, as well as various HRIS systems, SSO solutions, and digital signature technologies) then Raindrop’s SaaS platform is for you. Priced to compete in their market, built on the absolute latest technologies, hosted in the cloud, consumable virtually anywhere, and deployed into a “use it right now” Production instance, Raindrop is the industry game-changer you need.

The Roadmap

As a company built on the foundation of Procurement subject matter expertise, Raindrop’s goal remains to disrupt an industry clearly ready for positive change, and to establish Raindrop as the industry’s preferred one-stop solution for the entire enterprise S2P cycle. It was immediately obvious to us that Raindrop comes from a deeply experienced Procurement and business transformation background, when they clarified our comment on “S2P”, by telling us they take things one step further, and refer to the broader scope of the “Planning-through-Renewal” cycle. We’ll be keeping a very close eye on Raindrop, and expect them to become an industry-disruptive household name. With Raindrop’s fully-integrated Enterprise Spend Management platform and suite of capabilities, it’s clear that numerous companies, big and small alike, can gain significant value by acquiring Raindrop.

The Leader

Vijay Caveripakkam, Founder and CEO

A high-energy leader with proven skills in emerging technologies, Vijay is an entrepreneur and technology leader with deep background expertise in software, sourcing, program management, IT operations, business transformations, mergers and acquisitions. Prior to founding Raindrop, Vijay has held several executive positions in the semiconductor and technology industries. His passion for building technology solutions to solve pressing business challenges is the bedrock which Raindrop is built on. As an experienced world traveler, Vijay also loves working in a fast-paced, diverse, multi-cultural global environment. Combining executive and hands-on experience in Sourcing and Technology, Vijay’s vision for Raindrop as an industry-disruptive technology was set.

“An industry disrupting modern solution, Raindrop was built from the outset as a secure and seamlessly integrated modular Enterprise Spend Management platform with Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning technologies.”