Fieldglass and IQNavigator have been leading the market in the Services Procurement space for the last 6-8 years. However it seems like Jai and his team at Fieldglass have made a very clever move bringing permanent and direct hire functionality to their platform. Previously both solutions focused on providing functionality to manage contract/contingent labour within blue chip companies, streamlining their processes, managing risk and realising substantial costs savings. But in almost all cases their customers would require another system (ATS - applicant tracking system eg. Taleo or Vurv) to manage their permanent recruitment needs. Thus there was no single view of their human capital - both permanent and contract, with hiring managers requiring two interfaces to manage their full time and short resourcing needs.

With the new Insite 5.0 platform, corporates and the recruitment process outsourcing (RPO) providers have a single tool to manage both permanent and contingent recruitment processes. The Services Procurement space always lay between HR and Procurement, so the move to offer them one solution for all their recruiting should be a big positive for the corporates. Procurement in most blue chips is deeply entrenched in the negotiating of agreements with the recruitment agencies and also managing the relationship on an ongoing basis. But permanent recruitment spend is an area where procurement does not have so much input. Thus for first time the unified system should now give the business a single view of its spend of it human capital spend and also manage direct hires.

I presume this change of direction was driven by the needs of the RPO providers in the first instance, as they look to implement one solution to manage new customers human capital spend.  Interesting IQNavigator have taken a slightly different direction by offering their own managed service platform, which would potentially compete with that of the RPO and BPO players. I guess only time will tell which business case will be more successful.

Fieldglass (www.fieldglass.com) - Fieldglass is committed to providing intelligent solutions that help companies successfully acquire contingent workers, services and direct hires. An industry-leader, Fieldglass recognizes the changing organizational landscape and complex challenges that global enterprises face today. With that in mind, coupled with years of technology expertise, Fieldglass delivers award-winning InSite software to meet client needs and exceed their expectations.

IQNavigator (www.iqnavigator.com) - IQNavigator, a global company headquartered in Denver, Colorado and with offices throughout North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, is the leading provider of managed service programs and on-demand services procurement software. Since its inception in 1999, IQNavigator has become recognized as the vendor-neutral market leader in the highly dynamic and fast-growing services procurement and spend management sector, as measured by new customer wins, global deployments, revenue growth, and customer successes.