What Happened to Spend Matters? (2026 Update)

If you typed spendmatters.com into your browser recently and landed on The Hackett Group's homepage with no trace of Spend Matters anywhere, you're not alone. You didn't mistype anything.

Some will say this is old news… But I’m still getting questions about it… And a recent announcement brought this back to the forefront for me.

For nearly two decades, Spend Matters was the place many of us checked before building a vendor shortlist, prepping for an RFP, or trying to make sense of where the S2P market was heading. So it's worth taking a moment to explain what happened, where its tools went, and where you can turn now for procurement technology insight.

The Hackett Group completed its acquisition of Spend Matters in May 2025.¹ For a few months it carried on as "Spend Matters, A Hackett Group Division."² Then, in February 2026, Hackett published the annual "50 to Know" and "50 to Watch" procurement provider lists under its own name for the first time,³ crediting its Solution Intelligence analysts, "formerly the Spend Matters analyst team."⁴ Today, spendmatters.com simply redirects to Hackett's website.

Founder Jason Busch once described Spend Matters as "a story of pivots," and that's the best way to understand what it became.

It started in 2004 as a personal blog, an outlet for Jason's writing about the nascent procurement technology market. With early advertising support from Ariba and others, the blog funded a growing consulting and advisory business.

About six years in, Spend Matters borrowed from the AMR Research playbook and launched expert procurement technology research, with a lot more personality than the typical analyst firm.

Then, in 2017, came the biggest pivot of all: SolutionMap. Inspired by the work of Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman, who showed that experts are poor at overall predictions but remarkably accurate when rating specific criteria on a defined scale, the team set out to rate procurement technology on hundreds of granular features per module. Analyst scores were triangulated against customer ratings, published independently, to strip out analyst bias. Jason, Pierre Mitchell, Xavier Olivera and Michael Lamoureux built the first release: around 1,000 scoring fields across dozens of vendors.

Carina Kuhl, who joined as a marketing and product contractor, then spent the following eight years turning that ambitious blueprint into a scalable SaaS platform and the industry's leading methodology for rating procurement technology. Alongside SolutionMap came TechMatch, which maps your requirements to vendor capabilities, and the annual "Providers to Know" and "Providers to Watch" lists that every ProcureTech marketing team fought to get onto.

The good news: the core assets are still alive, now under the Hackett banner.

I know quite a few of the people at Hackett personally, and I have no doubt they'll keep this work alive and put these assets to good use.

But...

A research brand is only as good as the people behind it. And the people who defined Spend Matters are, one by one, no longer there.

Spend Matters will live on through its legacy. The data, the methodology, and the habits it built into how procurement teams evaluate technology aren't going anywhere.

But we can no longer call it Spend Matters. It's now The Hackett Group's Solution Intelligence: a research practice inside a consulting, benchmarking and advisory firm. That isn't a criticism. It's simply a different thing.

If Spend Matters was part of your routine, here are some places worth adding to it:

Pure Procurement is written by practitioners, for practitioners. I've spent more than 15 years implementing source-to-pay platforms across SAP Ariba, Coupa, Ivalua, Jaggaer, and more. Everything we publish is vendor-independent.

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Spend Matters mattered. Here's to keeping that spirit alive.