Category Archives: Miscellaneous

It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It

It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
And I feel fine

That’s great, it starts with a web-shake, noobs and trolls,
get terrified – the doctor is not afraid.
Eye of a hurricane, listen to the web churn,
bloggers serve their own needs, dummy serve your own needs.
Feed it off an aux speak, grunt, no, strength,
The ladder starts to clatter with fear fight down height.
Wire in a fire, representing seven games, entrepreneurs for hire and a lagging site.
Left of west and coming in a hurry with the furries breathing down your neck.
Team by team reporters baffled, trumped, tethered cropped.
Look at that low playing!
Fine, then.
Uh oh, overflow, population, common news, but it’ll do.
Save yourself, serve yourself.
Web serves its own needs, listen to your heart bleed
  dummy with the rapture and the revered and the right – right.
You vitriolic, patriotic, slam, fight, bright light, feeling pretty psyched.

It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
It’s The End of TechCrunch As We Know It
And I feel fine

Last Friday, TechCrunch ran a post that asked Where the Hell Are All the Rants? that noted that ever since some of its most prolific writers left the blog game to either a) become entrepreneurs or b) become investors, the tech blogosphere has been quiet — too quiet. And by quiet I mean so noisy that it’s difficult for anything of any substance (or signal) to come through. And the doctor agrees. Lately, he’s been reading TechCrunch less and less. Heck, this week it was almost indistinguishable from TUAW with all the me-too Apple coverage. I have to say I miss the TechCrunch of old where the bloggers asked How the Hell is This My Fault because not only did those posts have substance, they had character. You can find bland coverage on any old site. But you can’t find deep thought, real opinions, and the willingness to call out the elephant in the room and call a duck a duck (when it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck) on any old site.

To cut to the chase, no rants, no real opinions and willingness to make them known. No real opinions and willingness to make them known, no individuality. No individuality, no point. And that’s why it just may be the end of TechCrunch as we know it.

The Insightful e-book Spend Visibility: An Implementation Guide is still FREE!

That’s right, this illuminating e-book, co-authored by the doctor and Bernard Gunther of Lexington Analytics, now a division of Opera Solutions, which has already been downloaded over 2,450 times, is still completely and totally FREE.

This e-book, which is a rare medium well-dome, really is the definitive book on next level spend analysis performance. It’s one of the first books to not only get to the science of spend analysis, as compared to the elusive art, but to also provide you a detailed 10-step process that you can use to implement spend analysis in your organization and get real, repeatable, results — starting from your first project. And the numerous examples, backed up by 78 figures, really go the extra mile to making theory reality. There’s a reason it has been called one of the most comprehensive step-by-step resource guides I have seen for this industry and a reason the downloads keep going and going like the energizer bunny. It was written to help an average sourcing analyst get results, and that’s exactly what it does.

So if you still haven’t downloaded your FREE copy of Spend Visibility: An Implementation Guide, do so today!

Looking for Something to Read this Weekend? Download Chris LaVictoire Mahai’s ROAR for FREE today only!

Chris LaVictoire Mahai, managing partner at AVEUS, a global strategy and operational change (consulting) firm (on LinkedIn), has made the e-book / Kindle version of his new book ROAR available for FREE on Amazon (at this link) TODAY (and Monday through Wednesday of next week) for anyone who wants it.

The book, which uses the animal kingdom as a metaphor for building peak performance, and includes interviews with several executives to explore what drives peak performance, was written in an effort to help companies adopt a systematic approach to strengthening their performance chain. A good performance chain must be fast, flexible, predictable, and leverageable — and simultaneously balancing these requirements to achieve better customer outcomes can be tricky. As Chris implies, it’s like trying to combine the best qualities of the cheetah, elephant, coyote, and ant into one animal. (The Greeks found it difficult to combine the Lion, Goat, and Snake into a Chimera. So imagine the challenge we’re faced with!)

the doctor hasn’t made it through the whole book let, but the lessons learned summarized in the 4-Lens Profile are good ones:

  • speed at any cost becomes a negative
  • predictability delivered too late or for something that has lost market appeal is of little value
  • flexibility that extends every process, decision, or outcome is more harmful than helpful
  • leverage of every resource to the nth degree will deteriorate performance and increase risk

So, anything you can take away from Rashida Cheetah, Oralee Elephant, Ace Coyote, or Rickie Ant, or, better yet, the many executives that Mr. Mahai interviewed, is definitely worth your time.

SAP bought Ariba. What Should You Do?

 

Don't Panic

 

With one hand, pick up your copy of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, with your other hand grab a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster, have a seat, and read a few random entries while you have a nice relaxing drink. And definitely don’t panic.

In fact, don’t even give the acquisition a second thought right now. Why? Despite what every e-Procurement, e-Sourcing, and Supplier Network vendor seems to be implying with their comments (as summarized by Peter Smith over on Spend Matters Europe), press releases, etc., the reality of the situation is that, for the time being, nothing is going to change and you don’t have anything to worry about.

Since no one else is going to spell it out for you, the doctor is.

  • Ariba was the largest pure-play vendor in the Sourcing/Procurement space
  • SAP is one of the largest ERP vendors in the space
  • Large Companies are slow moving
  • Large Companies have high overheads
    (and can’t afford to sacrifice revenue streams without replacements)
  • SAP has a Fusion road-map through 2020

When you put all this together, and consider what has happened with past acquisitions in both companies, the following picture quickly emerges:

  • SAP is going to slowly merge Ariba products into its suite(s) through Fusion
    but this is going to take years and in the meantime
  • SAP is going to continue to sell and support Ariba as-is in the interim
    because it needs to not only make its money back, but support the high overheads until it is in a position to absorb Ariba into it’s core platform and do away with needing to maintain a separate suite.

In other words, you have a few years to come up with a backup plan if the way SAP merges Ariba’s suite into their platform isn’t to your liking or if the renewal costs when it happens are too rich for your blood. The only people who need to panic now are SAP partners where a significant percentage of their business came from SAP referrals as SAP will no longer be referring anyone with Sourcing, Procurement, or Supplier Network needs to third parties. (Companies like Hubwoo might be in this boat.)

Now, depending on where you are in terms of a renewal, or how much data you have in the system, or how much you use the system, you might not want to wait a few years to start thinking about moving off of the platform if you are worried about it meeting your future needs, but you don’t have to rush into a decision. And you certainly don’t have to panic. Time is on your side.

One Million, Nine Hundred Thousand, Six Hundred and Sixteen

One Million, Nine Hundred Thousand, Six Hundred and Sixteen words later (including the words in this post), or Three Thousand Two Hundred, and Fifty Five posts later (which does not count well over a hundred guest posts on other blogs) and Sourcing Innovation (SI) officially turns six. Although still not an extraordinarily long time in net-time, it is exceptionally significant in blog-time when the majority (in the 60% to 80% range) of blogs are abandoned within a month and a study of the top one hundred blogs in Technorati a few years back found the average life of an active blog less than three years!

Growth has continued, and as per last week’s post, SI is trending well above 125,000 visits a month, and the current trend indicates that SI is quickly closing on the 2,000,000 visits a year mark. (the doctor fibbed a little in last Sunday’s post when he said the graph was indicative of an average week. An average week actually has a few spikes in it these days, which pushes traffic close to, or over, 40,000 visits a week on average, as in the graph below.) And its reach on the search engines, and Google in particular, is still outstanding with almost 22% of visits coming from Google alone! (This means that traffic will continue to grow year over year. Why? The best SEO you can get is original content — and at almost 2 Million Words, SI is some of the best content there is!)

So stick around. SI is 24/7/365 and the best there is at Xemplification. Your Supply Chain will thank you. After all, it won’t be long before SI is legendary in the blog space!


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