Spend Matters welcomes a guest post from Mark Schaffner, VP of Marketing at Verian.

Although many would have you believe otherwise, the cloud cannot create world peace. It can't end hunger, lower taxes, or make your coffee taste better.

Although these specific claims haven't been attributed to the cloud just yet, the cloud has been so exaggerated and misunderstood that the average organization isn't really sure of what the cloud is.

If the cloud is not a panacea, what is it? The best and most accurate description I've ever heard came from our CTO, Bilal Soylu. The cloud, in his words, is simply another utility, delivering computing as a service, rather than a product.

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Spend Matters welcomes a guest point from Alun Rafique, Co-Founder of Market Dojo, a Bristol-based e-Sourcing solution start-up.

As technology advances, the most sophisticated products of the past become nothing more than amusing artifacts. Take the early versions of the car or the television or the mobile phone. My grandparents used to recount the stories of embarking on glamorous week-long trips across England in their open-top sports car, an MGB GT V8, barely meeting another car during their travels. A decade later they would be completely astounded when my father could answer his car-phone, installed at great expense, whilst blistering along a motorway.

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We're excited to announce our latest Spend Matters Perspective: Sourcing, Contract Management, and Supplier Management Cloud -- Business Users Benefit From Savings Enablement (Dining with Procurement, Not with IT). Authored by Spend Matters' Thomas Kase, the paper takes a close look at functional and business integration of cloud solutions in the sourcing, contract management and supplier management areas. Specific SAP business integration use and customer cases are included. Our findings suggest that cloud capabilities typically result in quick implementations with limited or no IT involvement and that the approach has empowered the procurement community in a range of ways, including ease-of-use and general front-line business user accessibility, permitting experienced sourcing experts plus more traditional "buyers" to walk up to a tool set and be productive with little or no training.

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Click here for Part 1 of this interview with Steve Brooke of CombineNet.

Thomas Kase: How should companies go about building internal skills to put advanced sourcing solutions to full use? Is there any other groundwork that they should address first -- e.g. other technology, data cleanses, master data management approaches, policy changes, non-solution specific end-user training?

Steve Brooke: You point out several areas that are applicable -- sourcing comes after many other steps in the process; regardless of whether this process covers 7, 13 or any other number of steps. Blindly following a prescribed process, irrespective of which consulting firm crafted it, is not always the best approach, more flexibility is often needed. Companies need to define their own processes, and follow them. Many tools mandate that the user is confined to a specific process and workflow, but the better approach is to provide a tool that can be modeled around customer's own process. In our case, the solution is flexible enough to be adapted to fit any given process through configuration.

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Having just returned from SAP Sapphire, I've got a tremendous amount to report on the progress of SAP in their core procurement application areas: SRM, Sourcing (including sourcing, contract management and supplier management), spend performance management and a new solution, Supplier InfoNet. But modules and products aside, one thing that continues to surprise me is the close (and unique) working relationship SAP has with a key partner, Hubwoo. I spoke to numerous folks on both the SAP and Hubwoo teams at the event and when customers inquire about SAP procurement solutions in the cloud, they said they were nearly always referred to the Hubwoo area -- despite the fact that others also offer hosted and managed versions of SAP SRM as part of their BPO partner relationship with the ERP vendor.

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It's been a challenging few weeks for those dependent on the cloud, despite the continued stratospheric valuations of some companies embracing virtual deployment and network business models. Even though we're not as likely to be impacted by Sony's recent fiasco in the procurement and operations world, when hackers twice accessed millions of user records, including credit card numbers, birthdays, addresses and related personal profile information, our kids most certainly were (and I'm betting at least a few dozen Spend Matters readers had compromised credit card numbers as well).

But when Amazon's cloud environment crashed, so did a number of other sites reliant on the shared infrastructure, including Coupa and Netflix -- though it should be noted that both organizations were back up and running in minutes, not hours. Coupa sent a note to customers and those close to the organization after the outage reading, "you will be glad to know that Coupa service was down only for 15-30 minutes for our customers; thanks to our unique operations capabilities & planning ahead for something like this."

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Yesterday, EDI provider GXS announced that it had acquired Rollstream, a supplier management software provider. For recent coverage of Rollstream on Spend Matters, you can check out an introductory post series in two parts from late 2010. See Part One and Part Two. Flash forward a few months from our initial write-up of Rollstream and GXS is positioning the announcement as deepening their "commitment to the social supply chain, a vision that brings together information flows and information workers to break down barriers hampering supply chain efficiency".

We'll dissect the true rationale behind the acquisition in the coming days -- "social supply chain" is jargony garbly goop in our view -- but regardless of deal positioning mumbo-jumbo, we believe this small acquisition is a turning point for the sector. By uniting a traditional EDI network with a supplier information management toolset that leads with compliance and supplier enablement, GXS has the potential to remake itself into a next generation Ariba Supplier Network. Add in one more element, electronic invoice presentment payment (EIPP), and GXS could be far ahead of its EDI -- and perhaps even supplier network -- peers in vision and ability to execute in a world where traditional electronic data interchange is mattering less and less. I'm sure some of you thought EDI was withering on the vine. Guess again.

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Spend Matters is happy to present a guest post from b-pack this afternoon. Founded in 2000, b-pack positions itself as a global industry leader providing cutting edge technology in business optimization and purchase-to-pay solutions. As the founder, chairman and chief executive officer of b-pack, Julien Nadaud is a global specialist in e-procurement and spending management implementation.

Back in 2000, the marketplace business plan centralized all B2B transactions in order to acquire an abundant amount of money. These transactions occurred because during that time, Euro creation and ERP vendors were stuck in the migration of old technology software. This migration meant undergoing major changes in the software, but without changing the technology. Internet applications were the only focus in the marketplace; it was assumed it would be enough to take over. The issue, however, is that the business model was not suitable for customers and/or suppliers, and the gap between ERP and marketplaces was too extensive.

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The WBR conference in Atlanta kicked off on Tuesday morning this week and wraps up today. I was scheduled to arrive early Tuesday, a day that may have logged the most canceled flights since 9/11. I landed 12.5 hrs late from PHL and was delighted to see a full house of attendees and vendors who must have wisely arrived the previous evening. Following on the week's weather, let's begin with clouds -- cloud spend management computing, to be exact.

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