This morning, we’d like to welcome back Ryder Daniels to Spend Matters. Ryder is Spend Matters resident tech-ed columnist.

We all know by now that Al Gore invented the Internet and President Bush summarily renamed Google "The Google." Now that that’s out of the way, let's talk about a few simple Google search tricks.

Google can be used as a no-cost method to do lots of interesting things. We'll touch on a few tips today:

• How to use Google to do some competitive intelligence research using the "filetype:ppt" technique
• How to use Google to see if suppliers might be advertising or referencing my company as a client using the "site" technique
• How to look for RFPs to examine questions, strategies, etc.

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Earlier today, Oracle announced the formal launch of its On Demand suite of procurement products. These solutions, which Oracle labels as Oracle Procurement On Demand should be no surprise to Spend Matters readers (check our recent coverage here and here.) When Oracle actually launched its On Demand procurement capability at OpenWorld last year, I noted: "The full range of Oracle's procurement products are now available in an On Demand delivery format including supplier management, spend analysis, strategic sourcing, contract management, requisitioning and procurement (both buy and settlement). In Oracle's words, what they've essentially done is 'to allow customers to deploy strategic procurement on the cloud with payment options that can still leverage behind-the-firewall ERP.' To support this vision, Oracle continues to plan to deliver hosting capabilities both internally and through partners (their internal delivery capability is limited to a single tenant format which is not true SaaS as others define it)."

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This Monday, we welcome back Ryder Daniels as he continues his tech-ed series.

To begin our weekly series about tools and technology for March, we're highlighting a service called BillShrink. Billshrink helps consumers and small businesses reduce costs for things like cell-phone plans, credit cards, and the like by providing them with comparisons of various services. These kinds of comparison services aren't new (think bankrate.com and lots of mortgage and loan-comparison sites), but newer services compare a larger number of products and services. For example, there have been some pricing changes with cell-phone providers like Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, and T-Mobile in the last quarter. The line between corporate and consumer discount plans is beginning to blur, especially at the high end with smartphones. Billshrink has done a good job of summarizing the new pricing here. It points out that there are over 10 million rate plan combinations out there, which is stunning.

In 2005, some companies moved their billing address and cell-phone phone numbers to a location with more favorable taxes, even to the point of giving up New York City cell numbers. Forbes did an article on this, showing that a whopping 15% was saved in taxes as a result. Back then, New York had the highest tax rate on cell-phone plans (16.2%), while Nevada had the lowest (1.1%). Whether you're managing just a personal phone or tens of thousands of phones, that can add up quickly.

Services like Mint go about this differently by first acting as a value-add account aggregator, then presenting competitive offers to reduce your costs. Mint was purchased by Intuit last year, and you can see some of the changes Mint is already making with QuickBooks. Have any SpendMatters readers used a comparison service to make a personal buying decision? As BillShrink and others offer more price comparison services to businesses, do we see using this model for purchasing as a viable option?

-Ryder Daniels

Ask a friend or colleague: "What's the biggest single budget item in your monthly expenses?" You'll probably hear the answers that most of us give: mortgage, car payment, maybe a boat. For some, it's education, or even debt. The real answer, of course, is none of these. It's our taxes.

President Obama's very first executive order when he took office in 2009 was the Open Government Directive. The idea was to provide transparency, participation, and collaboration, powered by new processes and technology, for a wide variety of government data sources. The first rounds of action for each agency were due on Friday, January 22nd.

In the meantime, the U.K. has in some ways crafted an even larger vision that recently launched. The U.K. open government initiative already has about three times as much data available than the U.S. initiative.

Delib, a U.K.-based company focused on Open Government projects, put together a 14-minute documentary on the U.S. Open Government initiative.

"Open Gov the Movie" - from Delib from Delib on Vimeo.

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Over the past twelve months, I've found an increasing number of companies -- both vendors and practitioners -- who wanted a more "analyst-like" way to commercially interact with Spend Matters, but were either not interested in sponsorship or advisory engagements, or, if they had the interest, lacked the budget for a consulting-type engagement. As a result (and as part of our desire to further productize what we do), Spend Matters recently created a new On Call offering designed to provide phone-based inquiry time. On Call also provides a discount on a range of other offerings, including on-site advisory time, webinars, and demand-creation programs; vendors also receive the ability to license -- for free -- up to two pieces of Spend Matters content per 12-month period. We designed the offering to be extremely straightforward and affordable, and to complement other, similar offerings in the analyst market. Based on our current staffing levels, we plan to initially limit the number of On Call members to a dozen organizations (we are in the process of signing our first On Call member this week). However, if demand reaches a higher level, we will bring on additional expert resources as required to meet demand.

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In the first of this two-part series on the new enterprise spend analysis product from Rosslyn Analytics, I tackled some of its spend visibility basics, such as how does the solution handle data, acquisition/management, enrichment, and basic spend queries. In this second and final part of the series, I’ll focus on what makes this solution stand out from a crowded field of spend analysis players. But before we get into specifics, it's worth restating (as Rosslyn articulated to me to me earlier in the month, and as other competitors in the sector also have told me of late) that the current and recent deal environment has been very strong. My own intelligence confirms this. So what's clear is that the overall pie slice of the spend analysis market is growing at a rate that is significantly above and beyond that of what industry analysts predicted. In fact, I'd wager than in 2010 we could easily see an overall sector CAGR exceeding 25% (potentially 50%, if you factor in some of the new capabilities, services, and content that spend analysis providers are bringing to bear, which don't necessarily fit how we've come to define spend visibility tools in the past). Which brings me to some of the areas that make Rosslyn Analytics jump out from the pack.

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( For Part 1, click here.)

One of the questions asked by some of Spend Radar's channel partners (and customers ) when first hearing of the tool is simple: does the world really need another spend-classification and -analysis product? Aren't there enough already? The answer to this is not as simple as it might seem. Yes, there are far too many products on the market; even the ERP providers have gotten around to finally releasing decent stand-alone offerings that include both the cleansing/classification and analytics bit. But few, if any, new providers tackle classification at the core of their offerings first, delivering a solution focused on simplicity of execution (making the hard stuff look easy), transparency, and flexibility. That is, of course, until Spend Radar launched out of the starting gates at a speed steadily ramping up to a breakneck pace only a few quarters past its incorporation date. But what caused Spend Radar to gain traction so quickly, especially considering that solid, albeit more complicated, solutions (e.g., transactional procurement providers like Coupa) had such a challenge with revenue growth early on?

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While I plan, over the holiday break, to find as many ways as possible to ignore numbers, charts, graphics, and useful and creative quantitative displays of visual information in general, there was a time earlier in the month when, although overloaded with ideas and information and most in need of a refresh, I still could say "wow" when I saw something exciting. That moment happened during a demonstration of Rosslyn Analytics’ enterprise spend analysis product. Now, I know what you're thinking: How could yet another spend analysis product cause such excitement, both in the heart and in the head? Haven't we already done analytics three ways to Sunday, and didn't Spend Radar and others already come up with a better mousetrap around classification? The answer, of course, is yes. But what makes Rossyln different is not just some of the capabilities of the application ( which are certainly more broad than deep, relative to some other offerings); it's the fundamental assumption behind what the role of spend visibility should be, and who, within an organization, should benefit from it. ( Hint: it's not just procurement anymore.)

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A few weeks back, over the best Korean fried chicken in Chicago, if not the world, I had the chance to catch up with Brian Daniels and Rod True of Spend Radar. In full disclosure, Spend Radar is not only a sponsor of Spend Matters, but Brian is a personal friend. Still, if I did not think that his organization was doing the right things, I would owe him nothing less than to say so in person, not to mention right here. But fortunately, that's not the case. Spend Radar, in less than a year since its launch, is on spend-classification fire. Without any outside investment -- and initially with offices that consisted of temporary conference space in a hotel -- Spend Radar has had over 40 projects (many of them global) this year and signed up over 10 channel partners. These include many household names in the management-consulting industry, not to mention a number of well-regarded boutiques. Moreover, Spend Radar has comfortably exceeded its first-year revenue plan, which was "in the low 7 figures." This might not sound like much, but for an SaaS vendor just getting off the ground with no outside funding, it's impressive, and represents significantly faster growth than many other providers in the sector.

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In a column from last Friday, I provided some background details on the current state of Spend Matters as well as intimating what might be around the corner. To summarize, for those who missed it and don't want to read the first installment in this series, what’s happened is really quite simple. Over the past 12 months, Spend Matters' traffic has increased to a level that places it among the top two procurement media sites in the world, as measured by third-party sites like Alexa and Quantcast, as well as our own metrics. We're in the same league as Purchasing, and materially larger than others that trail behind. But our challenge surrounding this growth has been finding new ways to deliver value to our readers outside the core model on a consistent basis.

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