IDC launches TechMatch to help businesses select software vendors

Analyst firm IDC today launched an online service that is designed to assist companies in selecting enterprise software that suits their needs.

IDC TechMatch is a self-service tool that currently picks up the software selection effort at the product shortlisting stage and proceeds to the generation of Requests for Proposal (RFPs), allowing users from multiple areas of the business to collaborate on software selection. Users need not be existing IDC subscribers.

Buying software is a time-consuming process that needs input from multiple areas of an organization, said Adam Harris, VP, digital product management at IDC’s parent company, IDG. (CIO.com’s publisher, Foundry, is also a subsidiary of IDG.)

In fact, IDC’s research has indicated that 44% of CIOs cited the high costs and complexities of sourcing as their top concern in a 2024 poll.

Consequently, Harris said, IDC saw an opportunity to leverage its research in conjunction with AI technology to cut the amount of work required in half (or better), and get information into CIOs’ hands more quickly so “they can be more confident in their decision.”

Phil Carter, IDC’s group VP and general manager of Tech Buyer Digital Platform Research, said the company has been considering the best way to incorporate AI into its product strategy for some time. “We realized that gen AI specifically would have a huge impact on the research industry, so we decided to build a product that allowed our customers to interact with our research in a conversational manner.”

IDC is aiming the service at the tech buyer space and looking to bring together CIOs, business leaders, and procurement executives as part of one platform for software sourcing. “We see a lot of issues for those executives in the context of confidently and quickly selecting the right vendor for their specific business needs,” he said.

Interacting with TechMatch

Customers begin their interaction with TechMatch after they have decided on their requirements and want to find vendors who meet them. After entering basic details about the project, they choose from a list of 30 software categories such as ERP, which generates an initial list of companies in the area, as well as preliminary requirements lists based on data from IDC MarketScape vendor assessments. IDC currently has information on close to 400 vendors, Carter said.

The user can then rank those requirements by importance: critical, high, medium, or low. If a customer requirement is not on the list, the user can add it; IDC monitors those additions and may add them to the platform at some point.

However, Carter noted, “the way that IDC frames the world is often not how our buyers categorize things. And so we’re learning that we need to maybe have more knowledge — what we call a knowledge graph orientation — towards this, where they can pick and choose different options, and they define their requirements a bit more dynamically, as opposed to falling into our traditional categories as we’ve done as a research house over the years. So it’s really forcing us to ask ourselves some of the harder questions about how we should serve this up in the future.”

As the criteria fall into place, the application winnows down the list of possible vendors. Users can click through and view IDC research on each, add comments, and even “favorite” vendors. Each one is scored based on its match to the requirements. For example, all other things being equal, if Product A’s pricing model requires annual commitments and Product B’s is quarterly, the buyer’s preference, then Product B will have a higher vendor score. Requirements can also include support and implementation options.

To provide another perspective, IDC has partnered with software marketplace G2, which provides customer ratings and comparisons of products. “We see that as complementary, because this provides the peer review perspective on that product, so that it adds another layer of value to a user,” Carter explained.

Where G2 provides peer feedback, IDC’s research is curated and analyst-driven, he said: “We think both are interesting and can bring some value to customers.”

Once the shortlist has been established, TechMatch can generate RFPs from predefined templates, which the buyer can then customize.

The generative AI component lets buyers query the selections, although during a demo it wasn’t able to cope with a request that included more than one criterion at a time.

At launch, the platform will only be available in the US, in English, but plans are already underway to localize it for other geographies, based on demand, Harris said.

Roadmap

The initial release of TechMatch is very much only version one. It will expand beyond the 30 software categories and 400 vendors tracked today to include more software, and perhaps even hardware and IT services, Carter said.

He also said that there is the potential to expand the tool’s scope to help companies develop their lists of requirements.

Also on Carter’s to-do list: making the generative AI system smarter, improving the RFPs, incorporating pricing data into the platform, and helping users explain the decisions that they’ve made through executive summaries.

In the future, Carter added, “We want to go with proactive, guided conversational engagement with users throughout the sourcing process.”

It will be, Harris said, “a really smart teammate who can help you make decisions, leveraging the research that we have, and still having the analyst in the background, just in case.” IDC TechMatch is available now. The company has not announced pricing.