Enterprise Irregluars Content

Sitting down with Tradeshift’s Christian Lanng always presents an opportunity to hear exceptionally strong opinions on the industry and technology. He is one of the best people to argue with, as well, as his opinions tend to get sharper the more you push back. Christian is also good for some of the best one-liners in the history of this sector, such as his quip “Ariba doesn’t have customers, it has prisoners.” Last week, I spoke with Christian over Skype and posed a number of questions about why Tradeshift is entering the procurement sector.

A few weeks back, I participated in a Spend HQ webinar, The Spend Visibility Curve: Where Do You Stand. During the discussion, I introduced a spend visibility maturity model that I’ve been thinking about for some time – and which I’ll introduce today and cover in more detail in subsequent posts in this series. At the core of the model is more of a definitional question itself: What is the difference between spend analytics and spend visibility?

As a follow-up to the first installment in this series highlighting future supplier network-based applications made possible through platform-as-a-service (PaaS) architectures and business models, this second post shares additional business application-type apps that future networks might deliver, including network-based contract lifecycle management capabilities, virtualized environment health safety and safety health environment management, project, portfolio and initiative management solutions and more.