I built the thing I always wanted to buy.

For more than fifteen years, I bought and implemented procurement technology for some of the largest companies in the world. And every single time, I hit the same walls.

The first was the simplest, and somehow the most maddening: how do I even find these vendors? There was no list. No consolidated, trustworthy map of who was out there. So I'd Google. I'd scan event sponsors. I'd ask around. It was scattered, inconsistent, and I was always certain I was missing someone who mattered.

And when I did find them, the next wall went up. I'd land on a vendor's website and have to decode it — what do they actually do? What are they actually selling? Everyone described themselves differently, in their own language, the same idea wearing ten different names. There was no way to line them up and compare like for like, because no two of them spoke the same way.

So I started building that shared language myself — a way to describe what procurement technology does, in consistent terms, independent of how any vendor chose to market it. Not what they say they are. What they actually do. That became twelve functional layers, and ninety-six capabilities beneath them.

But knowing what a vendor does still wasn't enough. Because I was never really buying a product — I was buying a capability that had to fit into a system I was building. I needed to know where each vendor sat in that architecture: this is your core strength, this is what I'm bringing you in for — and, just as importantly, here's what else you can do that I might benefit from. Vendors never fit in a neat box. I needed to see the whole shape of them.

And once I could see the whole shape, I wanted to stack them. To compare two vendors capability by capability — but more than that, to lay my entire stack on top of itself and see the gaps. To ask: what happens to my platform if I swap this one out for that one? Where am I exposed? What am I missing?

Then the last wall, the one that decides everything: are they actually any good? Two vendors can look identical on paper. So I wanted the signals underneath — enterprise readiness, the maturity of their technology, whether they're AI-native or just AI-flavoured, documented APIs, analyst and peer recognition, market sentiment, momentum, visibility. Because when two vendors are equal in every other way, those signals are how you choose.

That was the whole problem, laid end to end. Nobody had built the answer. So I did.

DPG Labs is that answer — the consolidated map, the shared language, the architecture, the comparison, and the signals, in one place.

I didn't build this from one point of view. Standing with me are my cofounders at One Supply Planet, and between us we've seen this market from every side. I've spent my career buying and implementing procurement technology inside large enterprises. Guy Strafford built one of the world's leading procurement consultancies. Ben Jackson built and scaled the platforms that move supplier payments and procurement data. David Bush has founded, run and sold the vendors themselves. The buyer, the advisor, the platform, the vendor — every side of the market, building the thing all of us wished existed.

We have no commercial relationships with any vendor listed. Every classification, every score, every recommendation is based on evidence. That isn't a disclaimer — it's the entire point. The map is only worth anything if you can trust it.