Several years ago, when I was writing for an audience of CFOs, the financial software industry went through a wave of particularly active consolidation when first Oracle paid $3.3bn for Hyperion, then SAP shelled out $6.8bn for Business Objects and IBM joined the party by acquiring Cognos for $4.9bn. All were big-ticket acquisitions, as the enterprise software industry finally nailed down the business intelligence and performance management space.

IBM’s completion of its acquisition of Emptoris, announced 1 February, 2012, is one more indication of the growing recognition of the importance of analytics in procurement, a use that procurement executives in several industries say is essential. Others outside procurement think it’s essential too: Gartner’s recent CIO survey concluded that analytics and business intelligence are the top-ranked technologies for 2012; Consultancy A.T. Kearney has long pushed for increased use of analytics in supply chain management; and the American Management Association has just added a new course on how to improve analytical skills to its list of educational seminars.

Launching a new supplier information management product recently meant that I did alot of research into the market. One clear trend I found was that a wider range of companies - often slightly smaller than the traditional multinational user - are starting to deploy SIM tools.

The procurement talent crisis faced by Asian operations is well known and often discussed, but a great example of just how chronic things can become was provided by Donna Trowbridge, head of supply management for Credit Suisse, APAC.

Most companies today drive a fairly uniform payment terms policy in supplier negotiations, attempting to enforce the most beneficial terms possible uniformly across their supply base. Exceptions are generally driven by negotiations rather than an actual strategy.

In part I of this latest guest post, Alex Saric, marketing director, Emea, at Ariba, discusses how procurement and finance must work closer together, what the benefits of doing so are and the challenges they face.

There's an interesting article written by Steve Garnett, chairman of online CRM provider Salesforce.com's European business operations, on the Financial Times website, which goes into how social media has reached critical mass - not just in the consumer world, but in the business world too.