
Last Look at Oracle OpenWorld 2013
The ghost of Anthony Lye presided over Oracle OpenWorld’s third-day customer experience, or CX, keynote. For CRM and related things, it was the moment I’d been waiting for. Lye is in robust health as far as I know, but he has been gone from Oracle for about a year. He was the architect of Oracle’s […]

Procurement Acquisition Alert: What is Oracle Getting From Endeca? (Part 1)
Oracle’s acquisition of Endeca has the potential to go down as one of the best enterprise analytics/applications/search deals in history. Because Endeca’s Latitude solutions are such a complement to Oracle’s entire line of application …

Oracle’s Endeca Acquisition — An Initial Take
Earlier this week, Oracle announced it had entered into an agreement to buy Endeca. For those in the procurement, supply chain and manufacturing worlds who don’t know Endeca, you should. They represent what Spend Matters believes is a …

Simplifying IT: Potentially Disrupting the SAP SRM Ecosystem with a Simple but Great Idea (Part 1)
It’s rare that I encounter an absolutely novel idea in procurement technology circles. Most truly innovative companies that I’ve recently taken a close look at (e.g., Co-Exprise, Endeca, etc.) have focused on extending existing fe…

More TDWI Notes – ParAccel Rolling On, HP Stalled, Vertica Leading Insurgents
On my second day at TDWI, I was in meetings all day – events like this are a great opportunity for analysts to catch up with many of the companies they follow at one time, and this particular one was packed with sponsors. Congrats to the folks who sell sponsorships – they had a packed […]

Friday Rant: Spend Jihadists vs. Non Believers
Earlier this week, I met a number of practitioners deeply involved in spend analysis as the global Zycus Experience Tour kicked off its US leg in New York (I’m speaking at the Chicago event today and Houston and Los Angeles in the coming weeks as well). The event was well attended (50+ people), especially considering […]

2010 Prediction: Companies Focus on Supplier Social and Performance Transparency
In the first column in this prediction series on building supplier transparency, I focused on the area of financial and business transparency. But this is only one type of supply chain transparency on which companies will focus on building in 2010, h…

Friday Rant: With Technology Choice Comes Responsibility That Many Aren’t Ready For
When I first got started in the Spend Management world back when buyers were just buyers and Ariba, i2 and Commerce One were more happy to trade barbs with each other than actually deliver solutions that did what they promised, the fundamental defini…

Live From Endeca’s Manufacturing Summit
I’m in Boston today, sitting in on Endeca’s Manufacturing Summit. Michael Porter — yes, that Michael Porter — led off the day with a great overview of the basic foundations of how companies can create competitive advantage and how this maps to IT i…