the doctor thoroughly enjoyed the theme of last week’s Synertrade Digital Procurement Summit, which was the “Mars Age of Procurement”. Not just because it was forward thinking, but because a vendor finally proved to SI that at least some of their staff have truly been following the doctor‘s writings for years (including the writings here on SI).

Long time readers will recall that back in 2013 SI asked Why Aren’t We on Mars Yet? because General Dynamics promised us a manned mission to mars in 1975 back in 1963 and almost 40 years had passed since the promise and a mission to mars still looked to be decades out. And it wasn’t just interest in the space race that prompted this — it was knowing that this would force us to look ahead to the next generation of Supply Management challenges (and start thinking about truly next generation solutions to address them).

Simply put, it’s one thing to source everything needed to build and equip a shuttle for an International Space Station (ISS) mission, another to build and equip a craft for a mission that could easily span half a decade, and another challenge yet to manage the reverse transport of recyclable products and any raw materials we may be able to mine from Mars. So, as you can imagine, seeing a conference embrace a theme around the “Mars Age of Procurement”, even if only metaphorical, is very satisfying as it means the vendor knows that supply management challenges are always going to increase in complexity as our goals and needs evolve, that a company needs to take a long term vision in order to adapt and succeed, and that they understood the hidden metaphor the doctor put forward all those years ago.

Especially since times have changed in the six years since the article was penned. Now that the space race has become the chosen pet project of the tech billionaires, we are being told that we could see a mission to Mars by as early as 2038, which, while over sixty years late according to the General Dynamics timeline, is less than two decades in the future and gives us hope that we may yet again try to explore beyond the planet.

And this is another reason SI is very satisfied with the conference theme! The mere fact that an IT company, which has already survived for two decades as a stand-alone player with a single code base that has never grown by acquisition, wishes to be around as a stand-alone company in twenty years is truly admirable. We are in an industry where most companies want to see how fast they can get acquired or merged with another company at an investment multiple that makes the investors and founders rich; an industry that has already become the new “hot” landscape for Private Equity (PE) firms looking to roll-up, take public, or flip as many companies as they can in the Source-to-Pay (S2P) space now that it has three stand-alone Unicorns (valued at over 1 Billion); and an industry that creates solutions required by every single mid-size or larger company in the world. (All successful growing companies buy and sell — that’s just how business works.) When you consider all that, the fact that Synertrade is one of the few platforms that has deep support for direct (materials) and optimization, it’s leadership rankings from multiple analyst firms (including Spend Matter’s Source-to-Pay Solution Maps), and the fact that Synertrade, especially over the past few years, has grown to be a dominant player in the Source-to-Pay space (especially in Europe) that has been increasing it’s customer base by over 15% year-over-year and it’s revenue by about 30% year-over-year for the last four years, this is very notable.

And yes, the event was very well done. For more insight into the event, SI is directing you to the doctor’s pieces over on Spend Matters which talk about some of the key insights brought forward.