Icertis, the leading enterprise contract life cycle management platform in the cloud, today announced Gartner, a leading research and advisory company, designated Icertis as a key player in the contract life cycle management (CLM) market.

As the velocity of business increases, companies are realizing the need to digitally transform their commercial foundation to accelerate performance, protect against risk and optimize business relationships. Because every company’s commercial relationships are governed by contracts, contract management has become an increasingly important part of the digital transformation efforts within the business.

“CLM solutions are evolving from operational record-keeping systems used for legal auditing purposes into enterprise-level core systems for addressing business risks, costs and the pursuit of revenue maximization,” wrote Kaitlynn Sommers, Senior Principal Analyst of Gartner.¹

Gartner predicts the CLM software market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 12% through 2022 and the analyst firm reports that interest in CLM solutions is stronger than ever and remains a

leading topic raised by users of Gartner’s client inquiry service.

The Icertis Contract Management (ICM) platform, which is used by customers to manage all types of buy-side, sell-side and corporate agreements, enables companies to reimagine enterprise contract management, thereby transforming their commercial foundation.

“CLM presents a great opportunity for digital transformation, because it’s practical, well-scoped and

executable,” wrote Sommers. “The technology is proven, as is the ROI, which companies can use to fund other initiatives on their digital business roadmap. Additionally, adoption is increasing as organizations implement their digital roadmaps to eliminate paper and improve workflows and collaboration.”¹

A key development in contract management highlighted in the report has been the emergence of best of breed software solutions which challenge the traditional procurement and sales suite providers.

Companies are realizing that new cloud-enabled contract management applications offer higher chances of deployment success, faster adoption and more satisfied business users.

“Historically, stand-alone CLM vendors could be characterized as buy- or sell-side vendors, based on the types of contract they supported,” wrote Sommers.¹ “However, over time, the dividing lines between these solutions have blurred, primarily because CLM customers don’t want to have deploy and support multiple CLM solutions to handle the various contract types.”

Artificial Intelligence Will Drive Increased Efficiency

With contracts being digitized for the first time in history, advances in computer science can be applied to drive increased value from a company’s contract processes. Gartner reports that “by 2023, artificial intelligence will bring 30 percent more efficiency to the contract negotiation and document completion process in organizations that deploy leading contract life cycle management solution

Icertis is applying AI to this new pool of digitized data to transform contracts from static documents into live contracts which can interact with humans, surrounding systems and ultimately even other contracts. Icertis recently announced two AI applicationsthat enable companies to solve previously intractable enterprise contract management challenges.

“Leading enterprises are digitally transforming their commercial foundations – resulting in rapid expansion in the contract management industry as exemplified in Gartner’s report,” said Samir Bodas, CEO and Co-founder of Icertis. “By utilizing enterprise-wide, AI-Infused CLM platforms and placing contracts at the center of their efforts, companies will be able to accelerate their business, protect against risk and optimize commercial relationships.”