The Lowdown on Spend Matters 50 To Know / 50 To Watch and the ProcureTech100
This week is a solo episode. I rarely do them, and I thought long and hard before publishing this.
At the end of the day, I'm just one person who has a keen interest in digital procurement technology. I'm not an academic or a researcher, but I do take a passionate interest in what is out there and I have some strong views on what I feel should be the priorities when it comes to digital procurement transformations.
I'm also acutely aware that most of the listeners to the podcast are not CPOs in enterprise level organisations. My aim is to bring content out there to Procurement Leaders outside of Fortune 500 companies and to shine light on solutions that are a fit for regular, mid-market businesses.
Challenging or questioning the conventional wisdom of how these lists are made up is something I debated for a while.
Ultimately I decided that listeners need to know and understand what goes into selecting these lists, so as they can look at them with a critical mindset and draw their own conclusions.
I sincerely hope this episode provides value to everyone who listens to it and I would love to hear your feedback!

Spend Matters
Spend Matters are a household name to anyone in the Procurement space and are part of a larger parent company, Azul Partners.

Spend Matters was founded by Jason Busch in 2004 and was one of the first Procurement and Supply Chain Blogs.

The focus on digital procurement technology with their 50 To Watch and 50 To Know began in earnest in 2014, and has since grown to be the go-to resource for research, analysis and content in the digital procurement space.

So, what are the 50 To Watch and 50 To Know?

Let's have a look:
Almanac
They're part of a wider directory of digital procurement solutions housed on the Spend Matters called the Spend Matters Almanac.

The Almanac has over 530 listings from 59 categories and over 140 analyst insights.

Feeding into the Almanac is the Spend Matters Solution Map, an interactive software solution finder, where the user can select a comparison of different types of procurement software based on a bunch of different criteria and buying personas.

Spend Matters have a pretty big analyst team to crunch the data, and the listings have been going since 2014, so they have a huge back catalogue of content and analysis to draw from!

There are 23 different categories in the Almanac in total, and not all of them are focused on software itself. There are some consulting, training and membership organisations included in here too.

But this is what sets the base for the 50 To Know and 50 To Watch

So, how do we get from here to the 50 To Know and 50 To Watch lists?

"The Spend Matters® annual 50 Providers to Know and 50 Providers to Watch lists are determined by the entire Spend Matters analyst team to represent the best of the commercial providers that serve enterprise-level procurement organizations."

"We do not include brand new startups with only a few employees and customers who are piloting some “minimum viable products”. We track over a dozen of them right now and are working on highlighting them in the near future."...