The Forrester Wave™ Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 PDF

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The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up by Andrew Bartels February 24, 2021

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Key Takeaways

In our 32-criterion evaluation of contract lifecycle management (CLM) software providers, we identified the 11 most significant ones — Agiloft, CobbleStone Software, Conga, ContractPodAi, DocuSign, Exigent, Icertis, Ironclad, Legal Suite, SirionLabs, and Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions — and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps CIOs, general counsels, chief sales officers (CSOs), chief procurement officers (CPOs), and CFOs select the right one for their needs.

Icertis, SirionLabs, DocuSign, Ironclad, And CobbleStone Software Lead The CLM Market Forrester’s research uncovered a market in which Icertis, SirionLabs, DocuSign, Ironclad, And CobbleStone Software are Leaders; Agiloft, Conga, Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions, and ContractPodAi are Strong Performers; and Exigent and Legal Suite are Contenders. Contract Management, Support For Executive Stakeholders, And AI Are Key Differentiators As tools for contract creation and negotiation become more mature in meeting the needs of general counsels, CPOs, and CSOs, improved management of contract obligations and entitlements, targeted analytical functions for other stakeholders, and mature AI functions will dictate which providers lead the pack. Vendors that can provide these capabilities will position themselves to successfully deliver all the potential value of a CLM solution to their clients.

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The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up by Andrew Bartels with Matthew Guarini, Audrey Hecht, and Diane Lynch February 24, 2021

Table Of Contents

Related Research Documents

2 CLM Has Become A Strategic Software Product For Executives

Now Tech: Contract Lifecycle Management Software, Q3 2020

3 Evaluation Summary 7 Vendor Offerings Share reports with colleagues. Enhance your membership with Research Share.

8 Vendor Profiles Leaders Strong Performers Contenders 14 Evaluation Overview Vendor Inclusion Criteria 15 Supplemental Material

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The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

CLM Has Become A Strategic Software Product For Executives Contract lifecycle management software is at an inflection point in its own lifecycle. CLM software helps companies and governments create and manage the contracts that define their relationships with customers, suppliers, partners, and key employees. Historically, CLM software focused on helping these firms create and negotiate contracts. It primarily served the needs of general counsels, who are responsible for ensuring that contracts protect and safeguard the interests of their firms, and of the CSOs and CPOs who need to turn deals into contracts. However, CLM software is evolving in four ways. First, there’s an increasing focus on clients using CLM to manage the obligations and entitlements in contracts after signature. Second, CLM is being used to provide insight into the risks and implications of the overall contract portfolio. Third, new stakeholders like CFOs and chief risk officers are starting to leverage CLM analytics to understand how those risks and implications impact corporate financial results and business risks. And fourth, AI functions are rapidly percolating into every CLM product. These changes are expanding the scope and reach of CLM far beyond its initial focus on contract creation and legal departments. As a result of these trends, CLM customers or potential customers should look for providers that offer: • Strong support for post-signature contract management. All of the CLM vendors we evaluated provide good-to-excellent support for contract creation. But effective management of the obligations and entitlements of contracts is equally or more valuable. Yes, management of the business relationship embodied in the contract can occur in other related applications, but leading companies are starting to recognize that the contract is the heart of the relationship and that CLM is the optimal tool. Leading vendors are addressing this need by strengthening their products’ ability to manage contract obligations and entitlements. • Contract analytics and reporting for top corporate executives. Key business relationships with customers and suppliers don’t operate in a vacuum. External events, including natural disasters such as a pandemic, political upheavals like Brexit, or legal and regulatory changes, can test these business relationships, creating threats to revenues or unanticipated costs and financial charges. CFOs, chief risk officers, and even CEOs are starting to turn to their CLM systems for insights on how such external events will impact finances and business operations. Leading vendors are addressing these new stakeholders by adding analytics and reports specifically designed to deliver such insights. • Mature and well-developed AI functions. CLM vendors have embraced AI and are employing it to address a wide range of functional needs. They’re using AI to: 1) import and add appropriate metadata tags to legacy and third-party contracts; 2) provide chatbots for engagement with users; 3) guide users to assemble the right contract draft for their business purposes; 4) help assess risks in draft and existing contracts; 5) find contracts impacted by a new development where no preexisting metadata tags exist (e.g., a pandemic); and 6) help identify unknown or unidentified

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The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

risks and anomalies within the overall contract portfolio. Leading vendors have a longer history with AI, utilizing combinations of their own data scientists and leading AI specialists and training their AI algorithms using data and learnings from their clients.

Evaluation Summary The Forrester Wave™ evaluation highlights Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. It’s an assessment of the top vendors in the market and doesn’t represent the entire vendor landscape. You’ll find more information about this market in our reports “Now Tech: Contract Lifecycle Management Software, Q3 2020” and “The ePurchasing Market Is Growing Almost Twice As Fast As The Overall Software Market.” We intend this evaluation to be a starting point only and encourage clients to view product evaluations and adapt criteria weightings using Forrester’s Excel-based vendor comparison tool (see Figure 1 and see Figure 2). Click the link at the beginning of this report on Forrester.com to download the tool.

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The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

FIGURE 1 Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021

Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts Q1 2021

Challengers

Contenders

Strong Performers

Stronger current offering

Leaders Icertis SirionLabs

CobbleStone Software Ironclad ContractPodAi

DocuSign

Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions Agiloft Conga Legal Suite Exigent

Weaker current offering Weaker strategy

Stronger strategy Market presence

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The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

on t ra ct Po Do dA cu i Si gn Ex ig en t

ob bl eS to C ne on So ga f

Current offering

50%

3.32

3.79

3.36

3.40

3.33

2.13

Contract creation

15%

3.70

4.30

3.70

3.70

4.30

1.00

Contract repository and analytics

15%

3.00

3.00

3.00

3.00

4.00

4.00

Contract types supported

10%

4.60

3.80

4.20

3.00

2.60

2.20

Contract management and execution 15%

3.00

3.00

5.00

2.00

3.00

1.00

Contract optimization

20%

3.00

4.20

3.80

4.20

3.00

1.80

5%

4.00

4.50

4.50

3.00

3.50

1.00

Client experience and references

20%

3.00

4.00

1.00

4.00

3.00

3.00

Strategy

50%

3.68

3.44

3.56

3.12

4.28

3.00

Product strategy

60%

3.20

3.20

3.40

3.40

4.20

2.80

Corporate strategy

30%

4.20

3.40

3.40

2.60

4.20

3.40

Performance and financial position

10%

5.00

5.00

5.00

3.00

5.00

3.00

0%

3.00

3.50

4.50

1.00

5.00

1.50

Revenue

50%

2.00

3.00

5.00

1.00

5.00

2.00

Installed base

50%

4.00

4.00

4.00

1.00

5.00

1.00

Technology aspects

Market presence

C

C

lo ft Ag i

Fo r w res ei te gh r’s t in g

tw ar e

FIGURE 2 Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts Scorecard, Q1 2021

All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).

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The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

50%

4.64

3.76

2.40

4.57

3.32

Contract creation

15%

5.00

3.40

2.70

4.30

3.00

Contract repository and analytics

15%

5.00

3.00

3.00

5.00

3.00

Contract types supported

10%

5.00

3.40

2.20

3.80

2.20

Contract management and execution

15%

5.00

4.00

3.00

5.00

3.00

Contract optimization

20%

4.20

3.80

3.00

4.20

3.00

5%

5.00

2.00

1.50

4.00

3.00

Client experience and references

20%

4.00

5.00

1.00

5.00

5.00

Strategy

50%

4.68

3.48

1.92

4.20

3.32

Product strategy

60%

4.80

4.00

1.80

4.80

3.20

Corporate strategy

30%

5.00

2.60

1.80

3.40

3.00

Performance and financial position

10%

3.00

3.00

3.00

3.00

5.00

0%

3.50

2.50

2.50

2.00

2.50

Revenue

50%

5.00

1.00

1.00

2.00

2.00

Installed base

50%

2.00

4.00

4.00

2.00

3.00

Technology aspects

Market presence

s

Iro nc la d Le ga lS ui te Si r io nL ab s W ol te EL r s M Kl So uw lu er t io ns

Current offering

Fo r w res ei te gh r’s t in g

Ic er ti

FIGURE 2 Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts Scorecard, Q1 2021 (Cont.)

All scores are based on a scale of 0 (weak) to 5 (strong).

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The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

Vendor Offerings Forrester included 11 vendors in this assessment: Agiloft, CobbleStone Software, Conga, ContractPodAi, DocuSign, Exigent, Icertis, Ironclad, Legal Suite, SirionLabs, and Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions (see Figure 3). We invited Symfact to participate in this Forrester Wave, as it has in the past, but it chose not to participate, and we could not make enough estimates about its capabilities to include it in the assessment as a nonparticipating vendor. We excluded vendors that offer CLM as part of a broader source-to-contract suite, as we conduct a separate Forrester Wave evaluation for those CLM vendors.

FIGURE 3 Evaluated Vendors And Product Information

Product version evaluated

Vendor

Product evaluated

Agiloft

Agiloft Contract Management Suite

CobbleStone Software

Contract Insight Enterprise

17.7

Conga

Conga CLM

N/A

ContractPodAi

ContractPodAi

N/A

DocuSign

DocuSign CLM; DocuSign Analyzer

Exigent

Exigent Contract Manage Solution (Chameleon)

Icertis

Icertis Contract Intelligence (ICI)

7.14

Ironclad

Ironclad

N/A

Legal Suite

GaLexy

2.2

SirionLabs

Sirion CLM

2.25

Wolters Kluwer ELM Solutions

CLM Matrix

17.2.x

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6 R10.5 1

20.8, 2.1.0 2

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The Forrester Wave™: Contract Lifecycle Management For All Contracts, Q1 2021 The 11 Providers That Matter Most And How They Stack Up

Vendor Profiles Our analysis uncovered the following strengths and weaknesses of individual vendors. Leaders • Icertis remains a Leader in CLM, thanks to its laser focus. Icertis, based in Bellevue, Washington, is a CLM company that has enjoyed a great run of success in this market. Rated as a Leader in our 2019 CLM Forrester Wave, Icertis has attracted a list of more than 200 high-profile clients, including Airbus, Cognizant, Daimler, Johnson & Johnson, and Microsoft. Well-funded after raising $211 million and generating estimated 2020 revenues of $140 million, Icertis meets the needs of its global clients by customizing its core code base for individual clients; it can then make these customizations available to all clients. Icertis has focused primarily on CLM, apart from a couple of special-purpose apps like sourcing. Instead, it’s built integrations and linkages with leading vendors of sell-side lead-to-cash solutions like Microsoft Dynamics and Salesforce and buy-side source-to-pay solutions like Coupa Software and SAP Ariba. Icertis has strengths across all CLM functional areas, including contract creation, contract repository and analytics, supported contract types, contract management, and technology aspects. Its AI capabilities are very advanced and benefit from the willingness of most of its clients to let Icertis use their contract data on an aggregated, anonymous basis to train its AI engines. Strategically, it has focused on top C-level executives like CFOs and CEOs by stressing the role that contracts can play in building dynamic relationships with customers and suppliers. Its clients gave it above-average scores for usability but average scores for vendor support. The latter is our one area of concern with Icertis — it’s growing so rapidly and has so many high-profile clients that it’s stretching its implementation resources. In response to this issue, Icertis is strengthening those resources and developing a midmarket offering. Still, mid-tier companies need to insist on contractual provisions to ensure that they get the level of support that Icertis’ global clients get. • SirionLabs establishes leadership with its contract management capabilities. SirionLabs started in 2012 as a Singapore-based vendor of a solution to help companies track and manage the execution of their services contracts. Effective management of contracts has been a relatively neglected aspect of most CLM systems — vendors have tended to assume that contract execution and management should occur in the transaction systems to which the CLM feeds contract data. In 2016, SirionLabs started adding contract creation capabilities to its contract management functions and has morphed into a full CLM vendor. SirionLabs has raised $61 million in funding in the past couple of years. It has quickly grown to have more than 200 clients, with revenues that we estimate in excess of $25 million to $35 million in 2020, and has established new headquarters in Seattle, Washington. It’s...