Earlier today, we published an April Fool's post with the headline: "Ariba to Announce Definitive Agreement to Acquire Emptoris?" Even though our intention was to make the humor, sarcasm, and a bit of satire -- not to mention the April First mention -- apparent in the first sentence, we have taken down the post as a result of inbound calls. One person who contacted our office also suggested the post had "anti-Semitic" overtones with a reference to a Yiddish phrase. Obviously none of this was our intent and Spend Matters readers should be aware we take accusations like this very seriously. This person asked us to apologize to the Jewish community, which we are happy to do (in fact, part of the team here is Jewish and the owners are active in Jewish charities in the Chicago area -- and yes, we know a few words of Yiddish). We are sorry if we offended anyone through this April Fool's post, including the Jewish community. And especially we would like to apologize to Avner Schneur for attributing a quotation to him which was entirely made up by us. Avner, we are very sorry.

- The Spend Matters Team

What Will 2008 Bring in the Metals Markets? Earlier today, Lisa Reisman and Stuart Burns penned a thoughtful and lengthy post over on Metal Miner offering up their predictions for the metals markets in 2008. Among the metals categories they take their crystal ball to, the two examine where steel, stainless, nickel, aluminum, copper and zinc prices might be headed to on a global basis. In the same article, they also tackle the impact of a falling dollar and rising oil prices on global metals sourcing. What are some the assumptions driving the forecasts they present in their post? According to the metals blogging dynamic duo, “In the face of a slowing US economy, a mixed position for the European economies and a still strong Asian market, it is a particularly tough call this year to judge where prices will go. Our call is the US will teeter on recession. Europe though restricted by high ECB interest rates will still enjoy some (if reduced) growth providing the Euro/US Dollar exchange rate does not strangle exports. Asia in general and China in particular are still enjoying robust growth. China may well drop from the double digit growth of the last 5 years to high single digit figures but that is still a very significant driver for the world economy and particularly the world metal markets.”

Reading Stuart and Lisa reminds me about how much domain knowledge really counts in analyzing and covering specific commodities markets. Call me biased -- yes, I am married to one of the authors -- but relative to the price alerts and regurgitated crap that only mildly passes for journalism that the trades put out on metals, there's no substitute for the type of coverage that only true industry experience can bring to the table. Seriously, do we really want to know that the sky is falling and copper is up today, or do we care about why and where it might go tomorrow -- and what to do about it from a sourcing and trading perspective?

- Jason Busch

This morning, Ariba's Karen Master woke me up at 4:00 AM to pre-brief me on the most exciting news to come out of Sunnyvale in years. This was the voice of someone who had clearly pulled a few all nighters preparing for a massive announcement. Karen asked me to wait to Monday for the PR Newswire announcement at 8:15 EST, but I simply could not hold back any longer. So here goes with the news: Ariba is bringing back the Tradex platform. "The much loved piece of Marketplace plumbing was collecting too much dust," remarked Master. So “we had to bring it back, to meet the needs of our global customers." Daniel Aegerter and Jared Rodriguez, the founders of Tradex, who made out "like absolute bandits" according to one former Ariba executive now sitting on his own beach, will be coming out of retirement to run the operating unit. Mark Hoffman will serve as an advisor as well.

But what is the biggest news of all? Yours truly has been hired by Ariba with the title of "Tradex Evangelist". My goal will be to convince companies why they should trade paperclips online with the ultimate goal of cashing out their private exchanges, making billions from IPO proceeds. I've been armed with a massive expense account and a trusty HP calculator to model how much the returns will be (and there's a rumor that I'll even get a few babes -- or cookies, as some call them -- to travel around with me as I jet to exotic locales to spread the marketplace gospel). Wish me luck. Because after all, spend does not always matter ...

In related news, Vinnie Mirchandani has decided to join SAP and will "lead a team focused on training account executives to dramatically reduce discount offers to CIOs." Congrats, Vinnie!

- Jason Busch