It’s that time of year when Emptoris holds their annual conference, invites all the bloggers (but me) to their peace pipe pow-wow, and somehow stirs them into a blogging frenzy which results in the temporary flooding of the bitstream with post after post about Emptoris. It wouldn’t be so bad if we got good information out of it. However, possibly due to the “selective reporting” favored by members of the previous management team, this hasn’t been the case historically.

And while it does look like the new team is working harder at being open and communicating (except where financials are concerned, but it’s certainly better to share nothing at all then inflate the numbers by 20M), despite the flurry of activity over the last few days (which likely isn’t the end), we haven’t received much in the way of useful information yet, and, more importantly, it looks like most of the bloggers (except Bob) have missed the only point that matters. But first, a recap of the stories to date:

Spend Matters

• “Emptoris Empower Kicks Off — What’s on My Mind to Focus on?”What to ask? What to ask?
• “Emptoris Empower Dispatch: Emptoris is Thriving — But What’s Behind the Numbers?”They claimed 91% “booking sales” growth in the first half of this year, and that a lot of new business is from “channel partners”.
• “Friday Rant: Emptoris Echos — Cloudy With a Chance of Software”Emptoris takes to the clouds with echOS — is a cloud-based delivery system built to streamline the deployment and management of Emptoris solutions.

Procurement Leaders

• “Emptoris Empower: procurement’s moments of engagement”Geoffrey Moore’s keynote got everyone excited.
• “Emptoris Empower: beating the benefits drop-off”Patrick Echkhert’s presentation (on behalf of Cardinal Health) made a great point, implementations have to revolve around a sustainable savings/benefits plan.
• “Emptoris Empower: the case for mastering risk”Accenture’s Randall Moore explained how becoming a risk master leads to real returns and that technology and talent investments can pay for themselves 8-fold when you reach a level of mastery.

Gartner (Debbie Wilson)

• Dispatch From Emptoris Empower 2010$2 million investment in its data center infrastructure. Some procurement friends expressed frustration with gaps in functionality that aren’t being addresses quickly enough.

Supply Chain Matters

• “Emptoris 2010 Customer Event- An Anticipated Report of Glowing Progress”The management team has been clearly focused on getting closer to customer needs, while making implementation of its technology easier for customer to navigate and manage.
• “Emptoris Empower 2010 Customer Event- Summary Impressions”Over 100 customers went live with Emptoris applications this year. Emptoris signed a global agreement with SAP regarding the use of SAP Business Objects technology for business intelligence reporting and analysis needs across the Emptoris suite of applications. A new and transformed management team.

That last point is key, if you happened to catch one of Wednesday’s press releases, you’ll see that Emptoris added three new senior executives. Add this to the number of new executives the new CEO has brought in since his arrival, and you’ll see that the current management team is almost entirely new. At this point, he’s only a few executives away from an entirely new management team (and I will be thrilled the day it’s entirely new). This will be the key to their success (or failure) in the future.

In my view, Emptoris’ biggest problem historically has been their management team, which appeared to be hand-picked by the former CEO to mirror his corporate philosophy (and never challenge his way of doing things) — which obviously wasn’t the right one for Emptoris (because, if it was, why did they never truly make profitability and need yet another funding round last year just to stay afloat, almost 9 years after formation?). I hope the new team maintains the “get close to the customer and figure out what they need” strategy. In this economy, I think that’s your only chance of success.