Quick, what's the latest new theme that you've picked up on while reading Spend Matters of late? If you said the coverage of successful industry or vertically oriented Spend Management providers, you'd be right. And MFG.com is part of this success (as are SciQuest, Exostar and Quadrem, among others). Earlier this week, MFG.com announced its latest round of funding from existing investor Jeff Bezos (Bezos Expeditions) and the European Founders Fund. According to the announcement, MFG.com also grew significantly in 2006, noting that "Marketplace volume increased by 103% and revenue was up 97% from 2005."

MFG.com's funding round is further proof that vertically focused Spend Management models still have tremendous potential to capture a material share of the overall solutions market. What are some of the advantages of vertically oriented Spend Management approaches? Industry specific global supplier search, vertically oriented strategic sourcing processes, and pre-populated catalog content and contract templates are all advantages that targeted approaches can bring. Given the growing need for highly tailored Spend Management solutions, I reckon we'll continue to hear more and more from industry platforms such as MFG.com, SciQuest, and many others in the coming year.

If you're interested in learning about industry focused Spend Management in action, check out this upcoming webinar that Exostar is hosting with Boeing. The topic of the day will be how Boeing has been able to reduce supply chain risk, despite increasingly relying more on "buy" vs. "make" decisions with their extended supply base. Even if you already know about Boeing's previous move to lock-up titanium capacity to insure availability for their global suppliers, I suspect that you'll want to hear about the other advanced industry strategies which they're deploying as well. I know that I'm personally looking forward to seeing how much Boeing will disclose.

Jason Busch