A Spend Visibility Smack-Down

The Spend Fool, Eric Strovink, and other experts are evolved in a spend visibility and analytics smack-down debate in the comments section from a post earlier this week. The comments now outnumber the original words in the blog entry by over 10 to 1 (and are far better argued than this humble editor could ever hope to achieve). If you're curious to get the Fool's take on visibility or to learn more about Emptoris' and BIQ's approach to building and positioning their solutions, mark 10 minutes in your calendar to sit down and read the comments! And stay tuned for my post on Friday continuing the discussion when I dig into Ariba's recent enhancements.

Incidentally, this is turning out to be a major focus and discussion point this week for me, as I had a previously scheduled lunch with Rod True (founder of TrueSource, and now SVP of Spend Visibility Solutions for Procuri) on Tuesday before the debate on the blog took shape. Rod has been in the spend integration / gathering, cleansing, and analytics business just as long as Eric and others posting on the subject in the comments section. It was refreshing to hear another experience and fresh voice in the sector, and get Rod's perception on how and why the market is growing so fast. Because regardless of perspective, I think we could all agree that this is one part of the Spend Management market which is poised to break out in the coming 12 months (especially as supply performance and supply risk management become more of a focus).

- Jason Busch