I'm excited today to announce that NPI Financial has joined Spend Matters as an Associate Sponsor. NPI Financial is an Atlanta-based services firm that's laser focused on company cost reduction in a handful of categories: IT/telecom/outsourcing and transportation. Over the years, I've had numerous conversations with the firm's management team and I've found that they both position themselves and deliver results in a context that feels quite different from that of a more traditional consultancy. Indeed, they straddle the line between consultancy, category research/benchmarking firm and direct negotiator. But despite having a somewhat nuanced, knowledge-driven approach to category savings, their approach is catching on in the market, both directly with company executives as well as with private equity firms.

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I'm thrilled to announce this morning that Zycus has become a Lead Sponsor of Spend Matters. Previously an Associate Sponsor, Zycus has now assumed a Lead Sponsor role. If you're not familiar with Zycus -- or think all that they do is spend classification -- then you're clearly missing out. Zycus is a vendor that has transformed itself in recent years from a strong niche player in a single area to a broader Spend Management suite provider with capabilities stretching from upfront data acquisition, spend classification and analysis through to sourcing and contract management. And they have ambitions on building out an even larger footprint in the Spend Management market. I'm hearing Zycus' name come up in an increasing number of sourcing and related deals and it's clear that their message and solution focus on usability and value is resonating in the current environment. If you think that Zycus is just about spend classification, then your knowledge is clearly a few years old. A lot can change in a short period of time, and it has with Zycus.

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Last week, I introduced Spend Matters readers to Spend Matters Compass, a new research offering that we're launching on the site later today. One of the major purposes behind Spend Matters Compass, besides providing deeper research and analysis for free to Spend Matters readers, is to define a more concrete editorial and research calendar for the year. In each Compass series, we'll provide three to four downloadable PDF briefs on the subject of focus. Collectively, our hope is that each Compass series will serve as a useful and at least partially definitive guide for companies as they wrestle with the right set of technology, content, services, internal talent and process investments to get more from specific procurement and operations initiatives.

Our planned 2010 Compass research agenda (subject to modification) is below:

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Spend Matters 2010 has hit the ground running. We're on track to meet our internal goal of doubling our revenue run-rate by Spring through the introduction of new research, advisory and lead generation offerings that you'll be hearing more about in the next week. We also extended a full-time offer of employment this weekend to someone we hope will become a key player in nurturing our continual growth. And most important, in the past few weeks since the New Year began, we've maintained the traffic levels that helped catapult us to the top of the rankings for procurement and supply chain sites in 2009 (Spend Matters, Purchasing.com, and ISM are all around the same size if you triangulate from multiple ranking sites). This has continued to help our sponsors drive name and brand visibility, increase qualified traffic, identify new channel partners and expand the lead funnel. But as long-time Spend Matters readers know, we limit the number of sponsors on the site at any one time to 12 (8 Associate Sponsors and 4 Lead Sponsors). Just today, a Lead Sponsor opening became available.

Lead Sponsor positions do not open up very often (and when they do, it's often on a yearly cycle). We typically fill available spots within a matter of days or weeks. Associate Sponsor slots, which become available more frequently owing to the number available, have recently been placed under contract in a matter or hours (or even before an opening is announced on Spend Matters). If you're curious to learn more, Spend Matters Lead Sponsorship is a discounted bundled offering for organizations that not only want premier logo placement to drive branding and demand creation programs but also wish to take advantage of bundled Spend Matters advisory and inquiry services, conference/event speaking, forthcoming (new) demand creation programs and research, webinar and podcast participation and much more. For 2010, we've added some new components to the program, making it what we believe to be the best value out there for providers looking to integrate Spend Matters as a key component of their marketing efforts and strategy.

If you'd like to learn more about the benefits of Lead Sponsorship, please contact William Busch, Spend Matters' VP of Business Development: wbusch (at) spendmatters (dot) com. And stay tuned for two announcements in the next week about new ways of leveraging Spend Matters.

- Jason Busch

I'm very excited to announce today that Ivalua has become an Associate Sponsor of Spend Matters. Ivalua (which I recently began to review on Spend Matters) is a European-based Spend Management provider currently expanding into North America, and was the first to jump at the opening. Ivalua's timing was perfect: we knew only a few of days ago that the opening was coming available, and had not had time to advertise it to the broader community. Because Spend Matters limits the number of sponsorship slots -- 4 in the case of Lead Sponsors, 8 in the case of Associate Sponsors -- they tend to be snatched up quite rapidly when they become available. While I don't have much of a choice over who elects to sponsor Spend Matters, it's absolutely a treat when a sponsor brings a truly fresh perspective to the sector. Ivalua is a case in point.

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MetalMiner, Spend Matters' sister publication focused on metals sourcing, turned two today. Three years younger than Spend Matters, the site is nonetheless following in the virtual steps of this digital rag, quickly catching up with and overtaking established publications and media sites in its sector. Looked at from a traffic perspective compared with other procurement and sourcing blogs, MetalMiner is now the second most trafficked new media site besides Spend Matters in the sector. But our sister-publication is not gunning to capture a generic slice of the procurement and supply chain market. No, they’re going after an underserved but huge niche -- meeting the market intelligence and content needs of metals buyers, specifically.

These folks crave such things as detailed price forecasts and expert commodity analysis rather than "I told you so" alerts about price movements in one direction or another. They’re looking for edge, insight and opinion. And they're also looking for proprietary (yet free) content such as the daily global metals pricing available by registering for MetalMiner IndX. MetalMiner provides both insight and industry color in spades from a "voice of the buyer" perspective that is lacking in traditional publications and subscription services, many of which have served as mouthpieces for producers and distributors for decades. Just as Spend Matters is written by a collection of folks with an edge, opinion and knowledge of sourcing and supply chain, MetalMiner is authored in a similar voice by metals sourcing and trading experts.

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As the primary author and editor of Spend Matters, I must draw a line in the sand between the editorial and publishing sides of the business (which is supposed to happen in all forms of media, but all too often does not, including at least one long-established publishing model that I'm aware of in the sector). But sometimes, I must admit, I'm even more excited over new commercial -- i.e., sponsorship or advertising -- relationships than others. Endeca, who becomes a new Spend Matters Lead Sponsor today, is an excellent example of such a situation where I must contain my enthusiasm. Many of you are probably wondering why. The answer, fortunately, speaks for -- or should I say visualizes -- itself the moment you've had a chance to see an Endeca deployment whether it's in the Spend Management world or elsewhere.

In a series of earlier short posts on Endeca, I wrote that the solution is differentiated by its "ability to rapidly identify, locate and present information in entirely new ways so that information and insight literally pop off the screen -- instead of waiting for your cadre of sourcing analysts to sort through their OLAP environment and figure out what to do next ... [its] design and UI help to unearth opportunities that were previously impossible to find. While it's early going in the Spend Management world for Endeca, I have no doubt we'll be hearing more from them. And when we do, all of the existing incumbents in the spend analysis world would do well to take notice."

Once I'm able to speak to some Endeca users more closely about their experience with the application, I'll plan to share their stories here. But until then, if your organization is looking for new ways to gain actionable intelligence from both unstructured and structured spend, performance, risk and related supplier or part data -- with an emphasis on the former, considering that is a major differentiator for them -- then I’d urge you to at least look at a demo and decide for yourself whether or not you think this is as much a potential game changer as I do. In the meantime, please join in offering a warm Spend Matters welcome to Endeca. I have no doubt they'll make a name for themselves in the Spend Management world.

- Jason Busch

Today is the first day in the history of Spend Matters that Ariba is not a Lead Sponsor of the blog. I'm very excited that we'll be launching a series of new programs with Ariba later in 2008 and 2009, but I'll leave those for another blog entry to follow in the coming weeks. However, I want to take a few minutes in this post to thank the many people at Ariba -- a good number who have long since moved on and many of whom are still there -- for believing in Spend Matters from day one. And this despite my criticisms and analysis of the Sunnyvale company over the years! Of all these Ariba supporters, I am most in debt to Michael Schmitt and Kevin Brooks, especially, for supporting Spend Matters from the very beginning (Kevin helped me dream up the idea for the blog originally and Michael gave him the budget to sponsor it). Without Kevin, in particular, who coached me on style and form as I moved from being a traditional columnist to a blogger, this corner of the blogosphere would have never gotten off the ground. I'd also like to call out a large thank you to Scott Slone, Ariba's former webmaster, who has provided invaluable design and technical guidance over the years. So thank you Kevin, Michael, Scott and the rest of the extended Ariba team for being such a strong supporter of Spend Matters since 2004.

- Jason Busch

Coupa, a low-cost, On-Demand e-procurement provider is continuing to prove that how much a company spends on eProcurement is not necessarily tied to how user friendly or powerful the system actually is. In my view, this is especially good news for small and middle market companies who don't have the budgets to implement an ERP SRM solution -- or one from a more expensive best of breed provider. Coupa's latest release offers a number of enhancements, many of which Michael Lamoureux has already encyclopedically blogged about on Sourcing Innovation. I'll spare you the deep details on this post, but Coupa's most important enhancements in this latest release are focused on driving usability and adoption. Most important in my view, Coupa has invested in enhancing supplier enablement and connectivity through offering self-service capabilities designed to speed up the initial on-boarding and supplier management processes. In addition, the latest version also offers enhanced workflow for users and managers, additional UI enhancements and strong administrative capabilities for procurement and finance professionals.

All in all, the latest release appears to be a big step forward for the e-procurement upstart. But Coupa isn't just copying existing enterprise software paradigms in the latest release -- they're also leapfrogging others in some areas, incorporating newer paradigms and approaches to navigation and catalog/item search. For example, they've incorporated the concept of a tag cloud to help users find what they're looking for (see the picture below if you're curious about how this works). I asked Dave Stephens, Coupa's CEO and co-founder, why he chose to go down this path. Dave suggested to me that "progressive procurement organizations of all sizes aren't threatened by empowering employees in their e-procurement initiative. Rather, they actively recruit frontline employees in the pursuit to drive compliance and savings by bringing additional spend under management. Using Web 2.0 technologies such as tag clouds for better spend classification, these organizations enhance user adoption while simultaneously gaining far better insight on their spending."

- Jason Busch

Next week, we'll be announcing a new Spend Matters Lead Sponsor. The slot that is opening up was taken before I could announce its availability to the Spend Matters community (we limit the number of lead sponsorships at any one time to 4, and those who are interested are starting to make themselves known ahead of time). If you'd like to find out more about opportunities for advertising and reaching one of the largest online procurement and supply chain communities drop our new head of sales, Wiliam (Bill) Busch, a line: wbusch (at) spendmatters (dot) com. And yes, there is a family relation (he's my father and probably the only Wharton grad selling Web 2.0 marketing programs). Bill will be happy to tell you about a number of new programs we're offering for those with specific budgets to drive lead generation, thought leadership and general brand and market awareness. And when Spend Matters lead sponsorship slots become available on the blog I will continue to let the community know -- and offer them up on a first come, first serve basis -- provided they've not already been spoken for.

- Jason Busch