Friday Rant: The FreeMarkets Legacy: Accenture’s Gain, Ariba’s Loss
Eleven years ago, about two hundred of us were averaging 14+ hour days in a Class B office building in Pittsburgh, intent on changing the sourcing and procurement world. Thanks to a strong vision and the ability to raise enough ca…
With Smaller Providers, Software and Services Can be Hard to Mix (Part 1)
Back in the reverse auction heyday between 1999 and 2001, I spent countless hours helping FreeMarkets evangelize its position that companies should avoid buying either software or consulting to do sourcing, but rather a combination of both — a solution. Our primary argument was that the sourcing process was inherently too complicated and difficult to […]
Friday Rant: What’s Holding Ariba Back? (Part 2)
In the first part of this column from last Friday’s Rant, I shared a few thoughts on what I thought was holding Ariba back from even larger growth, from the perspective of solution and customer communications. In the second installment of this rant t…
Will the Industry Analyst’s Micro-Definition of Sourcing Ever Change?
I remember the first time I read a Gartner report at FreeMarkets. Our account representative at the time pointed out a new
report dedicated to examining “strategic sourcing” — something that
would be right up our alley. He referred me to a pri…
e-Three: Proof of the Commoditization of High-Quality, Low-Cost E-Sourcing
When I first got a peek inside a full service e-sourcing process in
the late nineties, I quickly realized that, despite all the posturing
and spin behind how FreeMarkets and others positioned it, the
process was really more science than art….
