IBM takes a lot of heat. Their diverse offerings and growth-by-acquisition business strategy means they have a staggering amount of competition in the marketplace. It also means they know when to be aggressive. Here are a few things to consider as you purchase or renew your IBM solutions:

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It's an uncomfortable topic.

There are some people who become irritable, demanding, and yes --somewhat emotional, for about a week at the same time every month. Their physical demeanor changes, they look tired, break out, and sometimes crave chocolate or chips more than usual.

They are accountants.

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"Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future" -- attributed to Niels Bohr (physicist, 1885-1962)

Every buyer faces the question: "What's going to happen to the price?" The only correct answer is: "It will go up, or down, or, exceptionally, stay the same." If I were able reliably to forecast the price of rapeseed oil (or cocoa, steel or tomatoes), then I would not be writing this article -- I would be sunning myself in the Maldives.

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Over on our World Class Procurement LinkedIn group (all practitioners welcome), we shared some of the summary findings from the 2012 edition of our annual Procurement Key Issues study we did a few months ago, and I thought the Spend Matters readership might be interested. So, to quote the Bud Lite commercial, "here we go"...

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Buyers can enable providers to help them reach their goals in a number of ways. In this third part, we explore two additional outsourcing goals -- allowing the buyer to focus on core capabilities and moving more items from fixed to variable costs -- and how the buyer can help the provider enable them to achieve these goals.

Focusing on Core Capabilities
We often hear buyers say that they have outsourced certain "non-core" functions so that they can focus their attention and efforts on more important or strategic activities. When you charge functional experts with managing the service provider relationship, the result is often micromanagement. Rather than focusing on core activities, retained managers end up putting even more time and energy into the very work they said they outsourced.

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I recently came across an interesting article on a war being waged between VMware and Microsoft. According to RW Baird, more than 25 percent of VARs expect the hypervisor category to be the scene of the most aggressive price pressure within IT in 2012.?

? Below are a few things to consider -- especially if you are renewing your Microsoft EA or VMware licensing agreement, or purchasing a hypervisor for the first time:

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Success of spend management initiatives, especially in those settings where leadership doesn't apply mandates to require adoption and compliance, requires a team what can effectively persuade stakeholders to the benefits and value of new procurement approaches. In these settings, change management trumps technology and process. Team members must actively campaign on behalf of the effort.

Here are some important steps to help groom your team members to become super change agents:

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The Hackett Group has long emphasized the need to balance risk and control within the P2P process, leveraging the "optimal" end-to-end channel rather than simply defaulting to the often overly controlled three-way match process. By doing so, organizations balance efficiency and effectiveness within the P2P process, freeing up resources to focus on higher value activities such as sourcing and supplier management.

And while Hackett has long published performance differences between world-class and peer organizations, recent analysis highlights some interesting perspectives when the P2P control environment is compared by geography. These insights come from Hackett's 2011 Purchase-to-Pay and Procurement benchmarks, in which we segmented performance by North American and Western European operations.

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Two weeks ago, I shared five IT spending mistakes retailers should avoid in 2012. But, with IT spending on the rise, you can bet there are several more pitfalls that will challenge retailers to keep their budgets in line and their initiatives on track. Here are four more:

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