Working with an IT procurement consultant can be a real advantage, in this article we explore why it can be so helpful, and when to use them

Voice is still where most customer interactions begin, even as organisations add chat, email and messaging to their support mix. For businesses whose volume is genuinely inbound and outbound calling, from sales teams running outreach to support desks fielding phone queries, a voice-first platform built around call routing, dialling and agent productivity is often a better fit than a broader omnichannel suite. In 2026, the call center software market spans everything from ligh

Customer service is one of the areas where AI has moved fastest from promise to practice. Rising customer expectations, real pressure on contact center costs, and AI tools that can now handle a genuine proportion of customer queries without any human involvement have combined to create both an urgent opportunity and a crowded, sometimes confusing market for customer service and operations leaders trying to work out what to buy. In 2026, the market has moved well past basic ch

Accounts payable automation has moved from a back-office efficiency project to a strategic priority for finance teams under pressure to reduce costs, improve cash flow visibility, and manage supplier relationships more effectively. Manual invoice processing is slow, error-prone, and increasingly difficult to justify when AI-powered capture and matching can remove most of the manual effort from the process. In 2026, the addition of AI-powered document understanding has signifi

For organisations that deploy engineers, technicians, or service teams into the field, the gap between what customers expect and what legacy systems can deliver has never been wider. First-time fix rates, same-day or next-day response windows, real-time engineer tracking, and proactive maintenance driven by asset data - these are no longer premium differentiators, they are baseline expectations in most B2B service contracts and an increasing number of consumer service markets

If your sales team is spending more time building quotes than closing deals - or if pricing errors and approval bottlenecks are slowing down your revenue cycle - you are not alone. For businesses selling configurable products or complex services, the quoting process is one of the most friction-heavy parts of the sales motion, and one of the most expensive to get wrong. Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ) software exists to solve exactly that problem: replacing manual, error-prone q

Most organisations manage hundreds, sometimes thousands, of contracts at any given time - with suppliers, customers, partners, employees, and regulators. Yet for many, those agreements still live in shared drives, email threads, and spreadsheets, with no systematic oversight of deadlines, obligations, or renewal dates. The cost of that disorganisation is well documented: research consistently puts revenue leakage from poor contract management at around nine percent of annual

Every organisation with a building, or a portfolio of them, eventually runs into the same problem: work orders scattered across email and paper, no reliable record of asset condition, and no easy way to see whether maintenance spend is under control. Facility management software exists to close that gap, but the market covers a wide range of buyer situations under one label. What makes 2026 a genuinely different buying environment is the widening gap between full real estate

Most small businesses reach the same point eventually: the spreadsheet of contacts stops working, follow-ups start slipping, and nobody can say for certain which deals are actually still live. That moment - not a strategic plan - is usually what pushes a small business to look for its first CRM. What makes this search harder in 2026 is that most CRM content online is still written for buyers evaluating enterprise platforms, even when the search term itself is squarely about s

For most auto dealers, the dealer management system is the one piece of software that touches every department at once - sales, service, parts, and accounting all run through it, which makes switching costly and choosing well even more important. That weight is exactly why so many dealerships stay on the same DMS for a decade or more, even when better options exist. What has shifted in 2026 is the arrival of genuinely modern, cloud-native platforms challenging DMS incumbents

Most B2B marketing teams no longer debate whether to run account-based marketing - they debate which platform should run it. The category has grown from a handful of specialist vendors into a wide field where advertising platforms, data providers, and content tools all now claim an ABM label, which makes the shortlist harder to build than it used to be. What has changed in 2026 is the split between the established, data-heavy platforms that built the category and a newer gene

Most organisations know their processes are held together by a mix of tribal knowledge, out-of-date Visio diagrams, and PowerPoint slides that nobody trusts. When an auditor asks how a process really works, or a transformation programme needs a reliable baseline, the honest answer is often that nobody is completely sure. That gap between how work is documented and how work actually happens is exactly what business process management software exists to close. The category has

If you sell complex, highly configurable products, whether that is industrial machinery, modular furniture, or made to measure garages and carports, the quoting process can quietly become one of the biggest drags on your sales team. Combeenation is an Austrian configure price quote, or CPQ, specialist built specifically to solve that problem for manufacturers and distributors with deep product complexity. For buyers comparing CPQ vendors, understanding how Combeenation's appr

If you are looking at endpoint management or cybersecurity platforms, you have almost certainly come across Tanium. The company has built its reputation on real time visibility and control across millions of endpoints, and it now positions itself at the centre of what it calls Autonomous IT, blending endpoint management, exposure management and security operations into a single platform. For enterprise IT and security leaders weighing up how to consolidate fragmented tooling,

If your business has ever juggled separate systems for payroll, IT device management, and HR records, only to watch a new hire's laptop arrive a week after their start date, you have felt the exact problem Rippling was built to solve. The San Francisco based company has grown into one of the most prominent names in workforce management software, built around the idea that HR, IT, payroll, and finance should run on one shared employee data layer rather than four disconnected s

Customer feedback is easier to collect than ever, and harder to act on with confidence. Most enterprises now gather survey responses, support transcripts, reviews, and social commentary from a dozen different channels, yet many CX teams still struggle to turn that volume of feedback into decisions the rest of the business will act on. The Voice of the Customer software market has also been through one of its busiest periods of vendor change in years, with InMoment folded into

Most organisations already have more knowledge than they can find. Policies live in shared drives no one maintains, process guides sit in email threads, expert know-how stays in the heads of the people who wrote it. The cost of that fragmentation shows up in onboarding time, inconsistent customer answers, repeated mistakes, and slow decision making across teams. Knowledge management software exists to close that gap - giving organisations a structured way to capture, organise

Hiring has changed faster in the past two years than in the previous decade. AI is now embedded across every stage of the talent acquisition funnel - sourcing passive candidates, screening applications at scale, conducting first-round video interviews, and scheduling at speed. For talent acquisition leaders managing high volumes or competing for scarce skills, the pressure to find and adopt the right AI recruiting platform has moved from aspiration to operational priority.

Procurement has spent years being underserved by technology. The tools existed, but they were slow, rigid, and built around process compliance rather than decision support. In 2026, that is changing fast. AI is now embedded in sourcing, supplier management, contract review, and spend analysis in ways that are materially changing how procurement teams operate and the value they can demonstrate to the business. The shift matters because procurement sits at the intersection of c

Finding and keeping the right people has always been the hardest part of running a business, and in 2026 the pressure has only grown. Organisations face a more complex skills landscape than at any point in recent memory - hybrid working, generational shifts in workforce expectations, and an accelerating pace of role change driven by automation are all reshaping what effective talent management looks like in practice. This post covers the leading talent management software pla