There is a huge consolidation going on in the ERP market today. The market seems healthy, and some of the participants are really quite active.

In the '90s, ERP officially became a technology market segment challenging MRP, accounting and financial-only package sales. At the time, companies worried that they would confront major replacement challenges when their business changed, grew or (most often) new and better technologies came along, making a compelling argument and value opportunity to replace and migrate upward.

Spend analytic projects are often driven to meet key goals of the chief procurement officer and procurement organization, chiefly cost savings. However, there are also many different possible uses or goals for spend analytic tools and projects, which might be driven by other executives or offices as well.

Since today's global business structures are bigger than the enterprise, we are bombarded by the power of social networking for the enterprise. But with several mega-enterprise software firms clearly committed to incorporating social networking into their solutions, the question is - isn't it time to abandon ERP in favor of a new solution? A new platform? A new software category for business? Or is enterprise social networking an element of the enterprise-ERP-package?

Most companies today are heavily outsourced and have suppliers spread out across the globe. Yet firms' knowledge of their suppliers and the environments they operate in is often limited and out-of-date, crippling their ability to successfully manage the dynamics of their supply base. This has introduced substantially more risk in global businesses.

The first and most obvious reason most people want to analyze spend is to find savings opportunities; figure out how to spend less and spend more wisely.

The data explosion: so much to look at, so much to sift through! We are so fascinated with big! Big boats, big cigars and big shoes. But what, really, is big data? What does it mean to your business? And how can you or should you manage it? Although adoption of the buzz word is new, the management of big data is not.

There has been enough hype about mobile shopping in general and mobile coupons in particular that you could easily be forgiven if you thought coupons and loyalty cards on mobile phones were a done deal, already available and in use today. The elephant in the room is that the bright clean crisp barcode image you see displayed on your smartphone's screen cannot be read by the majority of barcode scanners used in retail today.

The last two years have brought an explosion of Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions. Both new app players and traditional enterprise software license providers have provided new versions of their software and services to ensure a market presence in the cloud delivery model. Along with this change we have witnessed new models in pricing strategies. The problem is that it is very hard to compare pricing - not just between the competitors - but also for same-company cloud vs. on-premise options.

Modern spend analysis systems are capable of incorporating a huge variety of types and sources of data - everything from supplier data to contracts, purchasing transactional data, financial data, risk data, and much more. However, the power of these systems is often limited by the availability, completeness, and quality of spend-related data from source systems.