Spend Matters and ProcureCon Announce Partnership Agreement

I'm excited to announce that Spend Matters and ProcureCon are in the midst of an active partnership designed to drive additional thought leadership and discussion in the procurement and supply chain area. Even though the announcement has taken some time to get out of the door, we've been working together for a couple of months already and are looking forward to collaborating more closely both on Spend Matters research and at ProcureCon events. As a hint of what's to come, I'm looking forward to participating in an on-stage debate with an outspoken former CPO at a ProcureCon event later this year. We'll also be featuring shared surveys and research as we poll and interview the ProcureCon community about the latest sourcing and procurement trends, investments and activities in the market.

The partnership between the two organizations was founded on mutual respect that took significant time to develop. And we also did our due diligence first.

Carina Kuhl, who runs ProcureCon for WBRE, hunted me down at another event early last year and asked that we give her conference organization and community a chance (we had previously been critical). I accepted the challenge, and sent a team member to scout out two of their events and spoke to a number of vendor and practitioner attendees. All signs pointed in the same direction -- ProcureCon was on the up, providing solid and consistent insight and value to attendees.

As part of our relationship, in addition to some shared activities, research and event promotion, ProcureCon will actively promote Spend Matters Compass and Perspectives research to its community members. We also plan to showcase some of our findings and results in various roundtable and panel discussions at ProcureCon events (and potentially through video segments and other means as well). We're excited to launch into further collaboration with ProcureCon in 2011 and beyond. As Spend Matters and our associated sites continue to expand, we look forward to both building our own communities as well as partnering with others. If you plan on attending a ProcureCon event this year, look for at least one member of the Spend Matters team to be there, covering the goings-on and participating in the discussion.

- Jason Busch