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Licensed for Distribution

Magic Quadrant for Contract Life Cycle

Management
Published 10 May 2021 - ID G00467451 - 44 min read

By Patrick Connaughton, Kaitlynn Sommers, and 2 more

As organizations seek better regulatory compliance and faster authoring,

negotiation and signoff cycle times, interest in contract life cycle management
software is growing rapidly. This report will help application leaders responsible
for enterprise CLM solutions select the most suitable vendor.

Market Definition/Description
Gartner defines contract life cycle management (CLM) software as an application, installed on-
premises or delivered as a service, that proactively manages contracts from the initiation stage
through the award, compliance and renewal stages. In this context, a contract is any agreement or
contractual document containing obligations that affect an organization now or in the future (as,
for example, in the case of a nondisclosure agreement).

A CLM software solution’s core capabilities enable the user to:

■ Request a contract

■ Create a contract

■ Manage the negotiation and approval workflow

■ Store contracts

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■ Search contracts

■ Conduct advanced analysis

■ Update or renew a contract

Magic Quadrant

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Figure 1: Magic Quadrant for Contract Life Cycle Management

Source: Gartner (May 2021)

Vendor Strengths and Cautions

Agiloft
Agiloft is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Contract Lifecycle Management Suite (version 6,
release 10.5.1) caters to all contract types. Agiloft has approximately 630 customers using this
product. Agiloft’s operations are mostly located in North America. Its clients range from small and

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midsize businesses (SMBs) to large enterprises (those with more than $2 billion in annual
revenue), with high concentrations in the public, professional services and healthcare sectors.
Agiloft takes the leading role in most implementations of its software. Its top three
implementation partners are Deloitte, TCS and 4C (a Wipro company). Areas of future focus
include international growth through partners, a buy-side “request for x” (RFx) solution, and
improved integration with Salesforce and Microsoft solutions.

Strengths
■ No-code customization: Agiloft is open to building custom add-ons for clients, and clients can
use Agiloft’s no-code platform to create their own custom modules. As a result, Agiloft has
strong Ability to Execute for industry- or company-specific requirements.

■ Overall value: Users of Gartner’s client inquiry service say they derive high value from the
money they spend with Agiloft. Feedback has also been positive about the transparency of
Agiloft’s pricing model and the simplicity and economy of rightsizing fees based on projected
usage levels within flexible licensing tiers.

■ Market responsiveness: Agiloft has demonstrated responsiveness and resiliency in its work
with healthcare clients throughout the pandemic. For example, it has introduced enhancements
to speed up contractual activities for vaccine trials. It has also extended support hours to align
with clients’ work-from-home efforts and provided free professional services to clients doing
pandemic-related work.

Cautions
■ Usability: Agiloft recently completed a total revamp of its UI, including the keyword search,
mobile app, Microsoft Word interoperability and reporting dashboards. New customers should
allocate extra time to test the revamped UI, given that it is still in the early stages of adoption.
Agiloft will continue to support the legacy UI as its existing customers transition to the new one.

■ Support for global clients: Agiloft’s global network of sales and implementation partners is still
ramping up. Large, global companies headquartered outside the U.S. should vet Agiloft closely
to ensure it is the right choice.

■ Artificial intelligence (AI)-based contract review: Agiloft’s automated contract review and
analysis capabilities are fairly new, compared with those of the other Leaders in this Magic
Quadrant. It has a strong roadmap for enhancing these capabilities, but customers working with

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Agiloft on this front will effectively be early adopters.

CobbleStone Software
CobbleStone Software is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its Contract Insight Enterprise
Edition product (version 17.7) supports all contract types. CobbleStone has over 950 clients. Its
operations are primarily located in the U.S., the U.K. and Canada. It provides global sales and
support through partners. Its client base includes, in approximately equal proportions, small,
midsize and large enterprises. Its top three customer industries are healthcare, pharmaceuticals
and government. Almost all implementations of CobbleStone’s software during the past 12
months were completed by its own implementation team. Enhancements on its product roadmap
include automated contract compliance checks and improvements to its Contract Ai module
(such as the integration of third-party datasets to improve accuracy).

Strengths
■ Long-established industry expertise: CobbleStone has been providing contract management
software solutions for more than 20 years, so clients can take advantage of its strong industry
knowledge and best practices. There is also an extensive user community from which to learn,
and a proven methodology for deployment.

■ Flexibility of deployment and pricing models: CobbleStone offers three different versions of its
Contract Insight CLM software, each with different options for hosting, user licensing and
features. It can serve as an affordable entry-level contract repository for customers that want to
start small with a one-year subscription and grow over time into a full-featured, enterprise-level
solution.

■ Government support: CobbleStone is a U.S. federal contractor that has been awarded a General
Services Administration (GSA) contract on Schedule 70 (government cooperative contract). It
offers a range of government-contracting-specific functionality, such as Disadvantaged
Business Enterprise (DBE) tracking and reporting, and a U.S. Freedom of Information Act
contract portal.

Cautions
■ Size and revenue growth: Despite having been in business for two decades, CobbleStone has
low brand awareness and has grown at a slower pace than the Leaders in this market. Although
its customer service levels remain high, the company’s revenue has not grown as quickly as that

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of the Leaders — a shortcoming that reduces its ability to invest as much in research and
development (R&D).

■ Global support: CobbleStone’s primary staff are located in North America and the U.K. Almost
all its revenue comes from North American clients. It works through resellers to meet
international demand. For prospective customers that prefer to work directly with a vendor to
fulfill complex CLM needs globally, this is a drawback.

■ Vision and innovation: CobbleStone has begun to accelerate its innovation efforts, but still trails
CLM Visionaries in areas like collaboration and overall usability. CobbleStone recently released
enhancements to its proprietary VISDOM AI to improve clause recognition, comparison and
evaluation, but customer adoption is only just ramping up.

Conga
Conga is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Apttus, backed by private equity firm Thoma Bravo,
acquired Conga in May 2020; the combined company is named Conga. Conga has over 900 CLM
customers. Its Conga CLM - Winter ‘20 Release caters to all contract types, but has a particular
focus on sell-side end users. Conga’s operations are primarily in the U.S., Germany and the U.K. Its
clients range from SMBs to large enterprises. Its top three customer industries are high tech,
healthcare/life sciences and manufacturing. Over half of Conga’s implementations are partner-led.
Its top three implementation partners are Accenture, PwC and Deloitte. Future focuses include
continuing to unify Conga’s three CLM applications, building deeper contract analytics (for risk
scoring, for example) and adding more options for contract collaboration across stakeholders.

Strengths
■ Sell-side contracting support: In addition to CLM software, Conga offers configure, price and
quote (CPQ) and revenue management solutions, which makes it a good choice for sales
operations. The company also continues to invest heavily in its Salesforce-specific product line.

■ Diverse product offering: The combined Conga company has a range of diverse products that
will appeal to both small and large companies of different maturity levels. Companies have the
option of starting small with an “a la carte” authoring solution designed for small teams using
Salesforce, and then growing into an enterprise-level deployment of the Conga product suite.

■ Customer engagement model: Following the combination with Apttus, Conga has completed a
much-needed renovation of the customer support model (one of Apttus’ biggest weaknesses in

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the past). Conga has put in place new processes and methodologies and a Customer Success
Manager (CSM) program to stay on top of customer satisfaction metrics. These metrics are
actively monitored and reviewed by its top-level executives.

Cautions
■ Contract discovery and analytics: Conga relies on a partner, Kira Systems, for document
analysis and data classification functionality. Kira detects the clauses and Conga’s natively built
AI then extracts the exact field information and adapts it to the right format.

■ Procurement contracting: Much of Conga’s procurement-specific contracting support (such as

the supplier portal and scorecard, and procure-to-pay [P2P] integration) resides in the old Conga
Contracts product (Novatus), which has not yet been merged with the company’s unified, “go-
forward” CLM solution.

■ Overall company stability: Prior to the merger, Apttus had experienced an extended period of
instability accentuated by high executive turnover (including the CEO), low customer
satisfaction and a buyout by Thoma Bravo. Things were beginning to stabilize before the Conga
acquisition, but not completely. The new combined leadership and product offerings have
already shown considerable potential, but there is still risk to consider.

ContractPodAi

ContractPodAi is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. It has approximately 150 customers, many of
which have been gained in the past two years. Its CLM product caters to all contract types.
General counsel and in-house legal teams form the primary end-user group, followed by sales and
procurement teams. ContractPodAi’s operations are primarily located in the U.K., the U.S. and
India. Its clients are typically large enterprises. Its top three industries are high tech, professional
services and utilities/infrastructure. All implementation work is performed in-house. Highlights of
its product roadmap include the addition of smart clauses for contracts, an obligations tracker
and expanded multilanguage support.

Strengths
■ Legal support: All of ContractPodAi’s customers have legal end users using its application.
Many of the company’s employees have a legal background, which shows in their ability to
support legal requirements from a best-practice, as opposed to purely technical automation,
perspective.

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■ Outcome-based pricing: ContractPodAi is one of only a few CLM vendors to offer outcome-
based pricing, whereby a percentage of the annual subscription fee is contingent on desired
business outcomes being met (for example, a certain percentage of contracts being
autogenerated or a certain number of contracts passing through the platform’s workflow
process). It is also common for ContractPodAi to offer fixed-fee implementations, with the cost
rolled into the annual subscription fee.

■ Innovation and vision: ContractPodAi has invested in forward-looking features, which has led to
it being classed as a Visionary. These features include cognitive search, advanced reporting
and analytics, a virtual legal assistant, and automated self-service contract generation.

Cautions
■ Growing pains: ContractPodAi has achieved over 1,000% revenue growth in the past three
years, and the size of the organizations it supports has also grown significantly — to a median
of more than $2 billion in annual revenue. To stay competitive and continue to win new
business, ContractPodAi deploys agile two-week R&D “sprints.” This is an aggressive model,
and prospective customers should be aware that smaller vendors can quickly fall behind using
this type of approach.

■ Global support: ContractPodAi’s customers have traditionally been mainly in the U.S. and the
U.K., with pockets of customers elsewhere in Europe. ContractPodAi is expanding its footprint
into mainland Europe, Asia/Pacific and the U.S. through dedicated resources and partners, but
its unproven partner ecosystem limits its Ability to Execute on a global scale.

■ Integration: ContractPodAi’s support for integration with procurement, sales, CRM, CPQ and
other systems is not as mature as that of some other vendors. Although there is a standard
integration toolkit for solutions from Salesforce and SAP Ariba, other common solutions (from
Coupa and Workday, for example) have yet to receive out-of-the-box support.

DocuSign

DocuSign is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Gartner estimates that it has over 1,200 CLM
customers. Its DocuSign CLM product addresses all contract types, but a higher concentration of
customers use it for sell-side contracting. Its operations are primarily located in the U.S., Ireland
and France. Its customer base is fairly evenly split between midsize and large enterprises. Its top
three industries are high tech, healthcare and financial services. The majority of DocuSign

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implementations are led by its partners. Its top three implementation partners are Spaulding
Ridge, Simplus and Advanced Technology Group (ATG), a Cognizant company. The focus of
DocuSign’s roadmap is on adding functionality to support self-executing and self-enforcing “smart
agreements.”

Strengths
■ Momentum: DocuSign entered the CLM market with the acquisition of Chicago-based
SpringCM in September 2018. It has been able to use its established position in the e-signature
market and related ecosystem to expand its CLM presence rapidly. Since the acquisition, its
CLM customer count has almost doubled, to over 1,200 organizations.

■ Advanced analytics: DocuSign improved its advanced analytics capability dramatically with its
May 2020 acquisition of Seal Software. DocuSign has enhanced its ability to extract and
analyze contract data, and to provide contract review and analysis. It can now natively address
three of the most prevalent advanced analytics use cases: contract visibility/analysis, contract
review and contract risk assessment.

■ U.S. federal government customers: DocuSign CLM was one of the first CLM platforms to get
FedRAMP authorization in 2017. In 2021, DocuSign CLM will also be available in FedRAMP
Impact Level 4 (IL4)-compliant data centers serving the U.S. Department of Defense.

Cautions
■ Upgrade path from simpler products to CLM: DocuSign sells two products as a subset of its
full CLM solution: DocuSign Gen for Salesforce and DocuSign Negotiate for Salesforce. These
products can serve as steppingstones toward the full CLM offering. Both are built on the
Salesforce platform, unlike DocuSign CLM, which means an upgrade requires additional
configuration. DocuSign Gen also offers an agreement editor tool that enables users to “drag
and drop” Salesforce fields into a document template, so it would be a valuable addition to the
core CLM solution.

■ Reporting: Although DocuSign now excels at advanced analytics, following the addition of Seal
Software, its basic reporting capability is still fairly limited. Whereas other CLM vendors have
opted to embed in their solutions leading cloud-based business intelligence (BI) tools for
reporting, DocuSign built its own, which does not match the competition in terms of features
and functions.

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■ Integration with procurement systems: At the time of evaluation, DocuSign CLM had no
prepackaged and certified integrations with any of the established application vendors in the
procurement software market. DocuSign has since released prepackaged connectors for Oracle
(NetSuite) and Workday, and plans to release further connectors for SAP Ariba and Oracle ERP
later in 2021.

GEP
GEP is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Its GEP SMART CLM product has approximately 350
customers, which primarily use it to manage buy-side contracts. In addition to CLM software, GEP
offers solutions that span the entire source-to-pay process, including spend analysis, sourcing,
supplier management and P2P. Its operations are primarily located in the U.S., India and the U.K.
Its customers are almost all large organizations. Its top three industries are oil and gas/energy,
consumer packaged goods (CPG)/retail, and financial services. Historically, GEP conducted all its
CLM implementations itself, but it is now working on new partnerships to shift more of that work
to partners. Key enhancements on its roadmap include enhanced support for all contract types,
guided contract authoring and embedded analytics.

Strengths
■ Procurement support: GEP’s CLM solution is a core part of its broader source-to-pay suite.
Most customers deploy it as part of the full suite to take advantage of native integrations that
enable the creation of contracts from sourcing events (including pricing information) and the
tracking of purchasing compliance across purchase orders (POs) and invoices.

■ Custom requirements of very large, global and complex organizations: GEP has historically
partnered with very large companies to build the more advanced features of its solutions. If
custom enhancements are essential to meet highly specialized requirements, GEP has a good
framework in place to support this.

■ Compliance and risk: GEP has had recent success with financial services organizations that
have strict compliance and risk controls. These successes result specifically from its ability to
monitor contractual risk by combining supplier performance risk (scores) with legal-language
risk in accordance with defined key performance indicators and thresholds.

Cautions
■ Design favoring bundled, not stand-alone, deployment: Although GEP’s CLM solution can be

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bought separately, it is not typically deployed as a stand-alone product. It primarily serves

procurement users, and the full benefits are more often realized when deployed as part of GEP’s
source-to-contract or source-to-pay platform.

■ Contract authoring: Adoption of GEP’s contract authoring features, such as its Microsoft Word
editor and redlining, is relatively limited — most customers use the solution as a centralized
repository only. In this case, contract creation is typically achieved through bulk uploads from
Microsoft Excel.

■ Gap between vision and current adoption levels: GEP has a highly ambitious vision for CLM
that includes conversational BI tools and internal and external collaboration features, and that
extends beyond procurement contracts. However, most of its clients are still in the very early
stages of maturity and adoption, so, in some cases, there is a big gap between GEP’s CLM
capabilities and how its solution is used today.

Icertis

Icertis is a Leader in this Magic Quadrant. Its Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI) product has over
225 customers who use it to manage all contract types. Its operations are primarily located in
India, the U.S. and Europe. The majority of its customers are large organizations (those with more
than $2B in annual revenue). Its top three industries are pharmaceuticals/healthcare, high tech
and retail. Icertis both implements its solution itself and uses partners. Its top three
implementation partners are CloudMoyo, Deloitte and Wipro. Notable investment plans include
enhancements to its AI product portfolio in order to evaluate clause text against organizational
playbook rules, and extended language support for multilingual clause and obligation discovery in
contract documents.

Strengths
■ Broad support for all contract types: A high percentage of Icertis clients use its software to
manage all contract types used throughout their enterprises. Icertis has both the depth and
breadth of functionality to support most organizations’ complex requirements.

■ Microsoft integration: Icertis is a Microsoft partner, and its software is typically deployed on
Azure infrastructure (with hybrid cloud options), which serves as the platform for enabling its
blockchain services and cognitive search capability. Icertis has a high level of Microsoft Office
365 integration, including online editing in Word and Teams collaboration.

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■ Extended business apps: Icertis has demonstrated market responsiveness and adaptability by
developing “business apps” for clients that go beyond what a traditional CLM solution can do.
For example, it has developed a solution to help retailers manage promotions and rebates, and
an app to track compliance for government contractors.

Cautions
■ Implementations: Some of Icertis’ clients have reported difficulties with implementations and
upgrades. This is to be expected considering the company’s growth (over 75 go-lives in 2020),
and the complexity of the problems it addresses. However, its clients indicate differences
between how projects are initially scoped and the implementation effort actually required.

■ Integration: Some of the more substantial and specific implementation concerns came from
customers who were attempting to deploy Icertis’ software as an underlying platform and then
use its APIs to build a custom UI. Icertis’ philosophy that “anything you can do from the UI
should be possible through the API” is good, but it still has work to do to turn this into a
practical reality. Customers have also reported specific challenges when integrating Icertis’
software with that of Salesforce and Workday.

■ Implementation partners: Icertis is undertaking the difficult transition to a partner-led

implementation model. It has invested in certifying new global implementation partners, such
as Accenture and PwC, that can provide both legal and technical consulting, but needs more
time to gain expertise through real-life project experience. In the meantime, prospective
customers should vet potential partners closely and ensure that the staff appointed to them
have Icertis-specific experience.

Ivalua

Ivalua is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It has approximately 175 CLM customers. Ivalua
Contract Management (version 8.168) is primarily a buy-side solution. Ivalua offers solutions that
span the entire source-to-pay process. Its operations are centered in the U.S. and France, and its
clients tend to be enterprises with more than $1 billion in annual revenue in the manufacturing,
financial services and public sectors. The majority of its implementations are done by partners. Its
top three implementation partners are KPMG, Capgemini and PwC. Ivalua’s roadmap focuses on
expanding support for all contract types, AI-based clause segmentation, key term extraction and
collaborative contract authoring.

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Strengths
■ Industry-specific functionality: Ivalua sells tailored versions of its solutions, with industry-
specific requirements met “out of the box” for the automotive, manufacturing, public sector,
healthcare, financial services and construction/engineering sectors. This commitment to
offering industry-specific solutions includes a FedRAMP Ready status and progress toward full
authorization, plus listing on the FedRAMP Marketplace.

■ Suite integration: Ivalua’s entire platform is built on a single codebase and unified data model,
so organizations looking to extend their CLM can achieve a consistent user experience with
good visibility across contracts, spending and supplier data.

■ Flexibility to start small: Ivalua offers a low-cost Jump Start program that comes with a
repository module. The repository, which is typically used to store all contracts, including those
in PDF format, provides search capabilities for contract text and metadata, and the ability to
manage contract hierarchies and parent-child relationships. Additional modules include
authoring, cataloging and price list capabilities. For procurement teams that just need a basic
repository solution to start with, at a reasonable price, this can be a better option than a full-
featured CLM solution.

Cautions
■ Recent overhaul: In November 2020, Ivalua rolled out a major upgrade to its CLM solution. Most
of its existing customers are not on the latest version yet. The release added new and advanced
functionality focused on the overall user experience, the ability to work with Microsoft Word,
and AI to simplify the contract creation process, but its worth has yet to be proven across a
wide range of customers.

■ Lower-priority product: Ivalua’s CLM-specific R&D accounts for a smaller proportion of its
overall spending than is the case for other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.

■ New customer growth: Ivalua’s sales execution has limitations, with longer-than-average sales
cycle and implementation times, and few new CLM customers added in 2020, compared with
other vendors in this Magic Quadrant. Its revenue growth has been strong, but driven by a small
number of very large customers (those with more than $5 billion in annual revenue).

JAGGAER

JAGGAER is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. It reports over 600 CLM customers, which

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primarily use its software as a buy-side solution. In addition to the Contracts+ (version 20.3)
solution, JAGGAER offers solutions that span the entire source-to-pay process. Its operations are
primarily located in the U.S., the U.K. and Italy. Its CLM customer base includes midsize and large
organizations. Its top three industries are education, life sciences and the public sector. JAGGAER
takes the lead in the majority of its implementations. However, it is working on increasing the
number of its certified partner system integrators through a partner training program. Currently, its
top three implementation partners are Huron, RiseNow and Xoomworks. JAGGAER’s product
roadmap focuses on developing a conversational platform, augmented analytics and a “zero
touch” UI experience.

Strengths
■ Cost to value: Gartner’s research shows that JAGGAER’s products tend to be less expensive
than those of other source-to-pay vendors that include CLM functionality. JAGGAER offers a
tiered pricing model that uses company size to determine subscription pricing.

■ Integration with procurement and sourcing: Contract templates from JAGGAER’s CLM module
can be pulled into an RFP in the sourcing module for negotiation of terms before awarding a
sourcing event. Sourcing event data can automatically populate contract templates for the
winning bidders for the purpose of contract creation. Customers can meter purchasing against
contracted agreements with measurable/milestone deliverables and track budgets against a
contract. Suppliers can also invoice directly from a contract, rather than requiring a PO for
invoice approval and reconciliation.

■ Recent enhancements: JAGGAER has significantly bolstered its CLM solution in the past two
years. It has released a new search solution, expanded reporting by embedding Looker and
added a “guided contract” feature to help streamline contract creation and routing workflow.

Cautions
■ Market responsiveness: JAGGAER has not responded as extensively as the Leaders to clients’
changing CLM needs during the COVID-19 pandemic. For example, although its solution
supports analysis of presignature contract risk, postsignature contract risk analysis is not
automated and cannot be done in bulk.

■ Limited case studies showing positive ROI: JAGGAER was able to provide Gartner with only a
few concrete examples of customers having achieved a measurable ROI from its CLM solution.
Additionally, it was unable to provide customer satisfaction metrics at the level of detail

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provided by other vendors. At the time of evaluation, JAGGAER had only recently implemented a
more in-depth customer feedback program.

■ APIs: JAGGAER’s CLM solution comes with no open, public APIs. Such APIs are on JAGGAER’s
roadmap, but most legacy contracts are currently imported via XML or Microsoft Excel upload.

Oracle

Oracle is a Challenger in this Magic Quadrant. Gartner estimates that it has over 500 customers
using its cloud-based CLM solution. Oracle Procurement Contracts Cloud is part of the Oracle
Fusion Cloud Procurement suite of business solutions, but it can also be purchased separately.
Oracle’s operations are geographically diversified, and its clients tend to be midsize and large
enterprises from many industries and countries. Its product roadmap focuses on expanding
business process integration, improving analytics and enhancing the persona-based user
experience.

Oracle did not fully respond to requests for supplemental information for this Magic Quadrant.
Oracle provided a high-level product briefing, but did not respond to the vendor questionnaire or
provide recorded demos. Gartner’s analysis is therefore based on other credible sources, including
past product demos and Gartner client inquiry calls.

Strengths
■ Ability to execute globally: Oracle has cloud data centers, a wide range of implementation
partners and a customer service presence in all major regions of the world. It is well-suited to
large enterprises and those needing multiregional implementations and multicurrency and
multilanguage support.

■ Native procurement and sales integration: The same Oracle Procurement Contracts Cloud
solution is embedded in both the Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement and Oracle Sales solution
sets, which helps provide a broad range of contract type support. The CLM solution can be, and
has been, deployed on a stand-alone basis as well.

■ Strong momentum: Over the past few years, adoption of Oracle’s Fusion Cloud ERP and the
Oracle Fusion Cloud Procurement product has grown significantly. The CLM product is more
streamlined and easier to implement than the contracting module in Oracle E-Business Suite.

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Cautions
■ Collaboration: Oracle is adding Microsoft Teams and Slack integration, but has yet to complete
this work.

■ Difficulty of stand-alone deployment: Although Oracle’s solution can be deployed separately

from the broader cloud ERP suite, it is not always practical to do so, given its dependencies on
other modules. This can make the implementation cost higher than for a typical stand-alone
CLM solution.

■ Automated contract review: Oracle typically relies on partners for automated contract review
and analysis. Its native contract digitization, optical character recognition and metadata
extraction capabilities remain immature.

SAP Ariba

SAP Ariba is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It has over 1,400 CLM customers, which
primarily use its software for buy-side contracting. In addition to CLM, SAP Ariba offers solutions
that span the entire source-to-pay process. SAP Ariba’s operations are globally distributed. Its
clients tend to be midsize and large enterprises from many industries and countries. SAP’s overall
product direction focuses on introducing a single integrated platform, incorporating Ariba,
Fieldglass and S/4HANA, to support all spending, which will be brought to market as SAP
Procurement solutions.

SAP Ariba did not respond to requests for supplemental information for this Magic Quadrant.
Gartner’s analysis is therefore based on other credible sources, including past product demos and
Gartner client inquiry calls.

Strengths
■ Vision for industry-specific add-ons: SAP Ariba offers built-in capabilities that address the
specific requirements of certain industries. Examples include specific capabilities for direct
materials procurement and an add-on for the retail and CPG sectors.

■ Global breadth: SAP Ariba has comprehensive language coverage to meet support
requirements across 80% of the world’s countries. Local language support is available in 24
languages, in multiple time zones.

■ Brand awareness: SAP Ariba’s offering is the most common procurement-specific CLM solution

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that Gartner clients ask about. They are keen to understand how it compares with stand-alone,
specialized solutions.

Cautions
■ Ability to Execute: During Gartner client inquiry calls, SAP Ariba CLM customers consistently
report difficulties increasing adoption of the solution. Although the tool supports the full
contract life cycle, many customers use it only as a repository — they conduct authoring outside
the solution. Customers have also expressed frustration about the time it takes for SAP Ariba to
address their reports of bugs and requests for enhancements.

■ Market responsiveness: SAP Ariba has not kept pace with the competition in the CLM market
when it comes to responding to COVID-19-related challenges with new CLM features. For
example, many other CLM vendors have introduced new contract collaboration features to help
their clients cope with work-from-home situations.

■ Stability: Multiple changes in leadership have occurred at SAP in the past two years. Such
changes commonly cause concern and uncertainty in the market. They are something that
prospective customers should be aware of.

SirionLabs

SirionLabs is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. It has approximately 200 CLM customers. Its
Sirion solution (version 2.25) is used for all types of contracts. Its primary end users include
lawyers, procurement managers, and risk and compliance managers. SirionLabs’ operations are
mainly located in the U.S., the U.K. and India. The majority of its customers are large
organizations. Its top-three industries are financial services, telecommunications and consumer
goods. SirionLabs has historically taken the lead in all its implementations. However, it is building
up its implementation certification program with partners like Accenture, Fujitsu and KPMG. Its
roadmap includes a new procurement category management solution and additional collaboration
features.

Strengths
■ Support for contract risk mitigation: During contract creation, SirionLabs’ software
automatically highlights areas of risk, noncompliance and financial impact. It also supports
autoextraction of key obligations and service levels from contracts, not just clauses, which
assists the review and risk management of legacy contracts.

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■ R&D investments: SirionLabs has received significant private equity funding in the past two
years and used that to help scale up its development, quality assurance and test automation
abilities. Relative to its size, SirionLabs has also added a very high number of R&D staff
(including data scientists) to continue expanding its solution quickly.

■ Focus on customer success: SirionLabs closely tracks its customers’ CLM “health” with a set of
sophisticated monitoring tools. It has a solid process for identifying potential challenges and
reaching out to help customers — as opposed to just reacting to their bug reports and
enhancement requests. SirionLabs provided Gartner with quantifiable proof points and case
studies that show strong ROI for customers.

Cautions
■ Implementation cost and timelines: SirionLabs’ average implementation cost and time have
historically been higher and longer than those of most of its competitors. This is partly because
most of its customers have opted for a highly configured solution, as opposed to simply using
the out-of-the-box settings. However, in the past 12 months, more customers have deployed the
solution out of the box, which has begun to reduce the average implementation time.

■ Mobile support: SirionLabs lacks a dedicated mobile app. Functionality can be accessed from
mobile devices only via a web browser.

■ Global reach: Although SirionLabs’ application has been deployed using several non-English
languages, support is provided in English only. SirionLabs sells directly in North America and
Northern Europe, but typically relies on partners and resellers in the rest of the world. It has
fewer customers than the Leaders in countries and regions such as France, Germany, Austria,
Switzerland, the Middle East and Africa. It has no customers in Latin America.

Symfact

Symfact is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It has approximately 175 Symfact Contract and
Compliance Suite customers. Its solution is used for all types of contracts. Legal and compliance
teams are its main end users. Its operations are primarily located in Switzerland. Its customer
base is evenly split between small, midsize and large clients. Its top three industries are
manufacturing, technology and pharmaceuticals/life sciences. Symfact conducts all
implementations itself — it reports no implementation partners. Its product roadmap includes the
ability to integrate with third-party BI solutions, and enhanced support for business rules within

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process workflows.

Strengths
■ Legal and compliance support: In addition to CLM, Symfact has solutions that address
enterprise legal management, intellectual property management, license management, legal
entity management, and governance, risk and compliance. Additionally, Symfact is open to
deploying its CLM solution on-premises, which is increasingly uncommon in the CLM space but
sometimes required by organizations where risk management and compliance are paramount.

■ Security: Symfact’s CLM solution is Veracode-verified at the highest level (VL5). It offers
visibility into application security status across all testing types, including static application
security testing (SAST), dynamic application security testing (DAST), software composition
analysis (SCA) and manual penetration testing. Symfact also supports access and
authentication via application login forms, Microsoft Active Directory and Active Directory
Federation Services (ADFS), single sign-on, SAML and two-factor authentication.

■ Ability to meet requirements of European clients: Symfact’s clients are primarily located in
Europe, a region where Symfact has strong customer retention levels. It has strong support for
the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) through customer-specific configurations. Its
Switzerland-based support center offers support in English, French, German and Italian.

Cautions
■ Innovation and market responsiveness: Compared with the Visionaries and Leaders, Symfact
takes a highly pragmatic approach to its roadmap. Symfact did not report any specific
enhancements to its CLM solution that would help clients cope with changing business
requirements as a result of COVID-19. It also secured far fewer new CLM customers in 2020
than the other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.

■ User interface: Although its solution recently received a series of UI enhancements, Symfact
was late to introduce them, and it issues only one major release per year. Currently, over half of
Symfact’s customers are still on the old version of its tool.

■ Integration with procurement applications: Symfact does not have prepackaged integrations
with any sourcing or procurement application vendors. Its solution is very much focused on
legal and compliance stakeholders, rather than procurement or sales teams.

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Synertrade

Synertrade is a Niche Player in this Magic Quadrant. It has approximately 200 customers, which
use its CLM solution primarily for buy-side contracts. Synertrade offers solutions that span the
entire source-to-pay process. Its operations are mainly located in Germany and France. Its clients
are large enterprises, mostly headquartered in EMEA. It has a high concentration of clients in the
retail, automotive and CPG sectors. Synertrade typically takes the lead in its implementations. Its
top three implementation partners are EY, Deloitte and Capgemini. Its roadmap focuses on
automation, multidevice suitability and extending the scope of its solution through integration with
ecosystem partners.

Synertrade did not fully respond to requests for supplemental information for this Magic Quadrant.
Gartner’s analysis is therefore based on other credible sources, including past product demos and
Gartner client inquiry calls.

Strengths
■ Procurement support: Synertrade’s biggest strength is its ability to provide an integrated
solution comprising modules for CLM, spend analysis, sourcing and supplier management.
Most of its clients use it for two or more of these modules, which they deploy together in order
to manage both direct and indirect spend.

■ Pricing: Synertrade’s customers have shared positive feedback about its pricing and contracting
flexibility and its unlimited user licensing model. Its customers often identify lower overall cost
as a key reason for choosing its solution.

■ ERP integration: Synertrade offers a wide range of prepackaged interfaces to Oracle, SAP and
Workday. This is especially useful if Synertrade’s P2P solution is deployed in addition to its CLM
solution.

Cautions
■ Product management: Synertrade customers have expressed concerns about the timeliness of
the vendor’s delivery of product development, and about the speed and completeness of its
responses to product questions.

■ Viability: According to Gartner’s research, Synertrade’s parent company, Econocom, has

suffered a significant drop in trailing 12 months’ revenue growth and has a consistently low
profit margin.

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■ Geographic strategy and brand recognition: The vast majority of Synertrade’s clients are
located in Europe. Its brand recognition and customer base elsewhere are limited. It spends a
relatively low percentage of its revenue on marketing initiatives, which perpetuates these
shortcomings and hampers its Ability to Execute on a global basis.

Zycus

Zycus is a Visionary in this Magic Quadrant. It offers a homegrown suite of solutions spanning the
entire source-to-pay process, including spend analysis, sourcing, supplier management and P2P. It
has approximately 200 customers for its iContract product (version: Mercury), which is primarily
used by sourcing and procurement teams. Zycus’ operations are geographically diversified. Its
clients tend to be large North America-based enterprises in varied industries, as it takes a
horizontal-market approach. Its product roadmap includes plans to develop a native digital
solution, built-in templates for industry-specific contract types and specialized bots for targeted AI
use cases.

Strengths
■ Prioritization of customer enhancement requests: Zycus has a strong customer engagement
model for receiving and supporting product roadmap suggestions. It also has a formal process
for proactively monitoring customer success metrics to ensure value beyond the go-live and for
recommending solutions when an issue is identified.

■ AI solutions: Zycus has many advanced AI capabilities and purpose-built bots to monitor and
mitigate contract risks. These bots help Zycus’ clients identify and assess contract risks,
extract and apply metadata tags, identify force majeure, and maximize rebates.

■ Analytics and reporting: Zycus has extensive analytics capabilities to provide customers with
business insights across its integrated source-to-pay suite. This has helped Zycus respond
quickly to market needs. For example, at an early stage in the COVID-19 pandemic, it took Zycus
less than two weeks to develop and release analytics to find and analyze existing force majeure
clauses.

Cautions
■ Quality concerns: In the past year, Zycus rolled out a completely new UI. Clients initially
reported challenges in terms of inconsistent change management and communication. But
they have since received four additional releases, which have gone more smoothly because of a

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fully automated testing process.

■ Implementation complexity: Zycus’ configuration and setup process can be highly complex and
time-consuming. Customers have identified as particularly challenging the tasks involved in
setting up workflow rules and the scanning and metadata tagging of legacy contracts.

■ Sell-side support: Zycus’ support for sales and legal users is limited. Its Salesforce CRM
integration is new and unproven. Its ability to track and manage obligations centrally is also
fairly limited.

Vendors Added and Dropped

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor's
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

We review and adjust our inclusion criteria for Magic Quadrants as markets change. As a result of
these adjustments, the mix of vendors in any Magic Quadrant may change over time. A vendor’s
appearance in a Magic Quadrant one year and not the next does not necessarily indicate that we
have changed our opinion of that vendor. It may be a reflection of a change in the market and,
therefore, changed evaluation criteria, or of a change of focus by that vendor.

Added
The following vendors, which did not qualify for the previous edition of this Magic Quadrant, met
the present edition’s requirements for at least 150 CLM clients in production as of 1 October 2019
and more than $10 million in 2019 CLM software-only revenue:

■ ContractPodAi

■ Ivalua

■ Oracle

■ Symfact

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■ Synertrade

Dropped
■ Coupa: This vendor did not meet the minimum inclusion requirement of at least 150 CLM
clients in production as of 1 October 2019.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

To qualify for inclusion in this Magic Quadrant, a vendor had to have all of the following:

■ At least 150 CLM clients in production as of 1 October 2019. More specifically, the requirement
was to have a minimum of 150 clients live on a single CLM solution. If a vendor sold multiple
CLM solutions that met the requirements, it was to answer separately for each. CLM customer
counts were not to be combined across products. Additionally,

■ At least 15% of current customers had to have annual revenue of $1 billion or greater.

■ At least 25% of current customers had to pay more than $50,000 per year for the software
subscription fee.

■ More than $10 million in 2019 CLM software-only revenue (excluding professional services
revenue). CLM software revenue included the combination of software license and SaaS
subscription revenue for the calendar year 2019. For multiyear SaaS contracts, only the contract
value for the first 12 months was used for this calculation.

■ Its CLM product available for purchase on a stand-alone basis, separately from other
applications.

■ CLM customers that could use the product to manage all types of contracts — for example,
both supplier contracts and customer contracts.

■ CLM customers that could use the product to manage all phases of the contract life cycle. At
minimum, therefore, the product should include support for authoring, redlining, approval
workflows, e-signature and native reporting for ongoing compliance monitoring.

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Evaluation Criteria
Gartner appraises a vendor’s Ability to Execute by evaluating its products, services, viability and
overall customer experience. Ultimately, a vendor’s Ability to Execute is judged by its ability to keep
its promises and its success in doing so.

To reflect this, the Magic Quadrant assigns “high” weightings to the product or service and
customer experience criteria.

The criteria for overall viability, sales execution/pricing and operations each have a “medium”
weighting. This reflects the need for vendors to ensure they have sufficient funding and growth to
continue to develop, and to improve and support, products.

The market responsiveness/record and marketing execution criteria have “low” weightings.
Although it is important for vendors to remain competitive, marketing effectiveness has less of an
impact on their Ability to Execute than the other criteria.

Ability to Execute

Table 1: Ability to Execute Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Product or Service High

Overall Viability Medium

Sales Execution/Pricing Medium

Market Responsiveness/Record Low

Marketing Execution Low

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Customer Experience High

Operations Medium

Source: Gartner (May 2021)

Completeness of Vision
Gartner also evaluates vendors’ ability to grasp current and future market and technology trends,
customer needs and competitive forces — their Completeness of Vision. Ultimately, vendors are
assessed on their understanding of how market forces can be exploited to create opportunities
for growth. This is the more qualitative assessment, based on Gartner’s interactions with end
users and consequent understanding of the market.

As the CLM market matures, market understanding and innovation are becoming more important
for vendors to continue to deliver value to customers. Hence, these two criteria have “high”
weightings.

The offering (product) strategy and geographic strategy criteria each have a “medium” weighting.
Product strategy and geographic strategy are important if a vendor is to serve a global market and
provide individual clients with the right mix of in-house capabilities and partners.

The marketing strategy, sales strategy, business model and vertical/industry strategy criteria all
have “low” weightings. Although marketing strategy and sales strategy are an important aspect of
a vendor’s overall vision, Gartner believes that proven innovation is a better indicator of vision. In
terms of business model, most CLM vendors take a similar approach, which is why this criterion is
rated low.

Table 2: Completeness of Vision Evaluation Criteria

Evaluation Criteria Weighting

Market Understanding High

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Marketing Strategy Low

Sales Strategy Low

Offering (Product) Strategy Medium

Business Model Low

Vertical/Industry Strategy Low

Innovation High

Geographic Strategy Medium

Source: Gartner (May 2021)

Quadrant Descriptions

Leaders
Leaders are in the strongest position to influence the market’s growth and direction. They
demonstrate a market-defining vision for how CLM technology can help companies achieve the
business objectives of managing compliance and reducing process bottlenecks. Leaders can
execute against that vision through products and services, and have demonstrated business
results in the form of revenue and earnings. They excel in their combination of market
understanding, innovation, product features and functions, and overall viability.

While maintaining a well-established base of long-term customers, Leaders show a consistent

ability to win new deals with successful implementations. They have customers in the largest
number of geographic regions, and cover a wide variety of industries and sizes of organization.

Leaders are often the vendors that other providers measure themselves against.

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Challengers
Challengers have established presence, credibility and viability, and have demonstrated the ability
to meet customers’ expectations in terms of functionality and customer experience. Challengers
may have a good vision for technology, but may not have fully won over business stakeholders
and IT executives.

Challengers are well-placed to succeed in this market. However, they may not demonstrate
thought leadership or innovation to the same degree as Leaders. They may be a good choice for
organizations that value execution over vision and leading-edge functionality.

Visionaries
Visionaries are ahead of most competitors in terms of delivering innovative products and/or
delivery models. They are sometimes smaller vendors or newer entrants that embody trends that
are shaping, or will shape, the CLM market. Visionaries have a strong vision and roadmap, which
brings innovation and strong functionality to their platforms.

Visionaries may be a good choice for organizations that want an opportunity to skip a generation
of technology. They may offer a competitive advantage or a chance to influence their product
roadmap. They might be acquired or face a challenge to increase their market share. However, as
these vendors mature and prove their Ability to Execute, they may become Leaders.

Niche Players
Niche Players may offer compelling CLM solutions, but they often lack cross-industry adoption,
some functional components and consistent implementation track records.

Niche Players can often offer the best solutions to meet the needs of particular organizations,
considering the price-to-value ratio of their solutions. These vendors may win deals in specific
regions or industries. However, they are not consistently winning new business across multiple
regions or industries at the same pace as vendors in the other quadrants.

Some Niche Players demonstrate a degree of vision that suggests they might become Visionaries,
but they may struggle to make this vision compelling. They may also struggle to develop a track
record of continual innovation. Other Niche Players may have the opportunity to become
Challengers, if they continue to develop products with a view to improving their overall execution.

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Context
The CLM market is large, with more than 200 vendors. Merger and acquisition activity is
increasing as vendors seek to add CLM capabilities to their cloud-delivered suites of services in
order to meet the growing aspirations of organizations. The increased scope of solutions, plus the
increased adoption this enables, will boost the CLM market.

Application leaders responsible for contract management initiatives should:

■ Develop a multifunctional team to agree on the desired functionality, workflows and system
integrations when looking for a CLM solution. This approach increases the likelihood of a
successful vendor selection and an implementation with a high level of user adoption. A
comprehensive CLM system can address different process steps, such as capturing data,
authoring text and tracking changes, as well as negotiating, approving, signing and analyzing
contract content.

■ Recognize that adopting CLM does not demand an all-or-nothing approach. CLM can be
adopted at a departmental level (for procurement or sales, for example) as an organization
matures its processes. Satisfying an organization’s needs does not even necessarily require a
single CLM system, although this is the trend for most companies as they mature. The most
progressive approach to CLM is to adopt it as part of an enterprisewide strategy that considers
the interdependencies among contracts, business processes, and operational and financial
results, and that indicates a high level of maturity.

■ Pay close attention to CLM vendors’ growth and financial viability when selecting or renewing
contracts. There are a large number of vendors in this space, and market consolidation is
escalating. Talk to Gartner if a CLM solution you are using or considering is being acquired by
another vendor.

■ Evaluate CLM solutions from strategic sourcing application suite vendors when seeking a
solution purely for buy-side (supplier) contract management. Also consider these vendors if
integration with e-sourcing, supplier base management and/or P2P tools is a priority.

■ Evaluate CLM solutions that integrate with CRM or CPQ suites when seeking a CLM solution
purely for sell-side (customer) contract management.

■ Evaluate CLM solutions that integrate with enterprise legal management suites when a solution

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for the legal department is a priority.

Market Overview
CLM appeals to companies of all sizes in all industries. Implementing it can lead to significant
improvements in revenue management, cost savings and efficiency. Understanding and
automating CLM can also limit an organization’s liability and increase its compliance with legal
requirements.

Organizations without CLM struggle to manage their contracts effectively. The risks associated
with poor contract management include overlooked penalties, lost revenue, damaged brands and
lost savings. Even poor contract administration can lead to lost contracts, unexpected renewals
and expirations, and hidden clauses that leave a company open to liabilities. It is common for
business stakeholders to spend significant time determining which terms and pricing
arrangements are current, when no CLM solution is in place.

There are many benefits to mature enterprise CLM processes. Common benefits include
increased governance over what is signed, when and by whom, and the protection of knowing that
the correct contract terms are live. Such processes also provide deeper insights across all
contractual agreements by analyzing content, conditions and risk.

Evidence
Information used to create the inclusion criteria, market definition and vendor evaluations in this
Magic Quadrant came from many sources, including:

■ The authors’ interactions with thousands of end-user clients regarding their CLM initiatives.

■ Verified customer feedback posted on Gartner’s Peer Insights platform in 2020.

■ A series of briefings with and demonstrations by the vendors included in this Magic Quadrant.

■ Analysis of survey responses completed by the participating vendors.

Evaluation Criteria Definitions

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Ability to Execute
Product/Service: Core goods and services offered by the vendor for the defined market. This
includes current product/service capabilities, quality, feature sets, skills and so on, whether
offered natively or through OEM agreements/partnerships as defined in the market definition and
detailed in the subcriteria.

Overall Viability: Viability includes an assessment of the overall organization's financial health, the
financial and practical success of the business unit, and the likelihood that the individual business
unit will continue investing in the product, will continue offering the product and will advance the
state of the art within the organization's portfolio of products.

Sales Execution/Pricing: The vendor's capabilities in all presales activities and the structure that
supports them. This includes deal management, pricing and negotiation, presales support, and the
overall effectiveness of the sales channel.

Market Responsiveness/Record: Ability to respond, change direction, be flexible and achieve

competitive success as opportunities develop, competitors act, customer needs evolve and
market dynamics change. This criterion also considers the vendor's history of responsiveness.

Marketing Execution: The clarity, quality, creativity and efficacy of programs designed to deliver
the organization's message to influence the market, promote the brand and business, increase
awareness of the products, and establish a positive identification with the product/brand and
organization in the minds of buyers. This "mind share" can be driven by a combination of publicity,
promotional initiatives, thought leadership, word of mouth and sales activities.

Customer Experience: Relationships, products and services/programs that enable clients to be

successful with the products evaluated. Specifically, this includes the ways customers receive
technical support or account support. This can also include ancillary tools, customer support
programs (and the quality thereof), availability of user groups, service-level agreements and so on.

Operations: The ability of the organization to meet its goals and commitments. Factors include
the quality of the organizational structure, including skills, experiences, programs, systems and
other vehicles that enable the organization to operate effectively and efficiently on an ongoing
basis.

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Completeness of Vision
Market Understanding: Ability of the vendor to understand buyers' wants and needs and to
translate those into products and services. Vendors that show the highest degree of vision listen
to and understand buyers' wants and needs, and can shape or enhance those with their added
vision.

Marketing Strategy: A clear, differentiated set of messages consistently communicated

throughout the organization and externalized through the website, advertising, customer programs
and positioning statements.

Sales Strategy: The strategy for selling products that uses the appropriate network of direct and
indirect sales, marketing, service, and communication affiliates that extend the scope and depth
of market reach, skills, expertise, technologies, services and the customer base.

Offering (Product) Strategy: The vendor's approach to product development and delivery that
emphasizes differentiation, functionality, methodology and feature sets as they map to current
and future requirements.

Business Model: The soundness and logic of the vendor's underlying business proposition.

Vertical/Industry Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet
the specific needs of individual market segments, including vertical markets.

Innovation: Direct, related, complementary and synergistic layouts of resources, expertise or

capital for investment, consolidation, defensive or pre-emptive purposes.

Geographic Strategy: The vendor's strategy to direct resources, skills and offerings to meet the
specific needs of geographies outside the "home" or native geography, either directly or through
partners, channels and subsidiaries as appropriate for that geography and market.

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