The other day I read that Basware had made a ground-breaking deal that suppliers to the Finnish State ministry could now do electronic invoicing for free if they did not have an existing e-invoicing solution (we launched the first such solution in 2007 with the Danish governments EasyTrade, so it can’t be entirely ground-breaking, but nevermind).
This of course made me happy, happy that yet another vendor had taken a clue from our launch last year, free invoicing for anyone. It’s nice to see that our own business model was already influencing and changing an industry that has been standing still for 30 years.
And not only is Basware following our lead, but also industry giants like Ariba are walking in our foot steps. At their last user conference, Ariba announced “Procurement Gets Social with Ariba” and launched a big initiative, where they would… wait for it… talk with a bunch of people and then do something by 2020 (really 2020?!).
It made me happy because, when Tradeshift launched last year, everybody was saying that social networks and business processes would never mix, but we didn’t care because we believed business is much more than just formal business transactions, business is per definition social, you meet, you interact and you trade. And now the competition is at least paying lip service to our core strategy of combining free invoicing with social.
But this is also where you have to be careful, because free is not just free, and social is not just something you slap on to your solution as an afterthought, when it has become the latest buzzword, it is something which has to be carefully engineered from the beginning. If you as a potential supplier want to analyze how free the Basware deal really is for the Finnish you should ask the following questions:
- Why is this not free for suppliers who have an existing e-invoicing solution?
- Can I as a supplier use Baswares supplier portal freely for all my invoicing or only towards the Finnish State Department
- Will the Finnish State department allow suppliers of any provider to deliver electronic invoices using open API’s, or is this limited to Basware?
If they can’t answer yes to the above questions, it’s not free, then it’s just another marketing stunt to continue pressuring the last few dollars out of a dead business model. But I suspect we will see a lot more of this in the future, providers using the word free, because they know they have to, but not why they should do it.
I think it’s important to look beyond the word free and ask the hard questions. In Tradeshift we write on our front page why we are free, because we don’t want anyone to be confused, but still a lot of people have asked me, is Tradeshift really free? The short answer is yes. We are free and are always going to remain free for core services like invoicing, but there is a range of value-added applications for small business and enterprise that we are charging for now and in the future. This is a different business model, simply because charging for the core services such as electronic invoicing will actually limit our business case (could you imagine Facebook charging for picture sharing or status updates?).
But free is not only about money, in the open-source world it has long been known that open-source is free, not as in free beer, but as in freedom. This is what we strive towards with Tradeshift, that is why our integration API’s are publically available for anyone. This is why we never limit our suppliers ability to send invoices to anyone and this is why my co-founder Mikkel Hippe Brun is the chair of the OASIS BDX group who are trying to define open interoperable standards for exchange of business documents everywhere (not just claiming it’s open).
And for the social part, if you don’t understand your users and are more interested in getting that last dollar out of each of their transactions instead of actually helping them do business, then you don’t get it. Just putting together a PR-release and claiming you are social because you talk to a bunch of people is “socialwashing”, it’s not real. I should of course be happy that our competition is trying to mimick what we are doing, but in the end I know it will lead to a lot of broken promises in an industry that can’t suffer any more bullshit unless we all want the same image as OB10**.
So while we wait for Ariba’s social revolution in 2020, I can just suggest suppliers that they try Tradeshift today, we can guarantee it’s completely free and will always be free.
**EDIT: The linked article was mysteriously taken down. Instead the link is now pointing to the article’s mirror on the Internet Archive. You can read a bit more about OB10 in this interview on Purchasing Insight.
