Automotive marketplace Covisint inks deal with spending analysis specialist Zycus; analyst says Covisint returning to vision of being sourcing and messaging hub
Automotive industry-sponsored marketplace (ISM) Covisint has inked a deal with spending analysis specialist Zycus.
Zycus will be providing Covisint's original equipment manufacturer (OEM) members the ability to apply the United Nations Standard Products and Services Classification (UNSPSC) to their supplier catalogs. The UNSPSC, developed jointly by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and Dun & Bradstreet (D&B) in 1998, is all about identification and classification. How so? UNSPSC's 13,000 hierarchical categories and five-level numbering system mean that buyers can find precisely the products and services they're looking for, view similar products and services as part of any search, and analyze spending by aggregating buying activities it into a single view.
Where does Zycus come in? The company's AutoClass product, taking advantage of built-in UNSPSC libraries, provides automated UNSPSC classification, speeding up the process of mapping existing supplier formats into the classification. Nagendra Bahnu, product marketing manager for Zycus, gives more details. "AutoClass operates in a batch mode, where suppliers upload product content as a text file or Excel file. We can read from a legacy system also." Interested suppliers submit files to Covisint, and Covisint routes the files to Zycus, which reports seeing anywhere from a few hundred to several thousand items in a typical file.
After suppliers upload their catalogs, they can use quality assurance and validation reports from Zycus to make sure that the migration has been successful. So far, Zycus has enabled 100 Covisint suppliers to handle UNSPSC.
Covisint's deal with Zycus is one of the ISM's first public moves since last month's departure of CEO Kevin English. Analyst Kevin Prouty of AMR Research thinks that Covisint is on the right track with Zycus. "That's one of the things Covisint was built for, an industry-wide directory. They're looking for standards to jump on that can enable that."
Prouty says that Covisint is still trying to put together a long-term strategy, but that the ISM's direction has definitely changed. "They've stopped thinking three years out and are thinking three months out. They still have ambitions of being a hub, but a messaging and sourcing hub. Before, they got big-eyed and tried to be a collaborative hub."
Is it possible that Covisint won't survive? "Even if it closes, pieces of Covisint will survive," Prouty says. "Certains operations and codependent on Covisint. The OEMs have contingency plans for what to do with some of this stuff."
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