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. It wasn't quite the first procurement blog: that honor goes to Debbie Wilson's "Cool Tools," before she went on to a senior role at Gartner. With early advertising support from Ariba and others, Spend Matters gradually shifted from blog to media business, then added paid subscriptions for vendors.

In 2012, Pierre Mitchell joined after five years at AMR Research and seven at The Hackett Group running procurement research. His mandate was to help grow the business and build a practitioner focus. He also became a minority co-owner alongside Jason and his wife Lisa through Azul Partners, a holding company that housed Spend Matters, Spend Matters UK (led by Peter Smith) and MetalMiner.

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 feature by feature. Pierre was the head architect, with the whole team contributing, including Jason, Xavier Olivera and Michael Lamoureux, who helped with data modeling and the sourcing and technical platform requirements.

The design was a pure, product-specific performance 2x2. One axis was the customer score, built from 18 customer satisfaction metrics. The other was the analyst score, based on deep demos against roughly 1,000 requirements, a few hundred of them common technical requirements shared across process areas. Every requirement had its own 1 to 5 scale, with specific text defining each level. Today, AI shows up more and more as the Level 4 requirement.

Carina Kuhl, who joined as a marketing and product contractor, then spent the following eight years turning that blueprint into a scalable SaaS platform, pushing the data beyond the 2x2s into tools used for practitioner technology selections and vendor benchmarking. 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 revenue, though, was mostly on the vendor side. Vendor benchmarking, and the advisory and thought leadership around it, drove most of the revenue. Sheena Smith built out the vendor programs that bundled access to the SolutionMap benchmarks, PRO premium content, the analysts, and deliverables like white papers, webcasts and ROI tools.

The final pivots were about ownership. Copley Equity Partners carved Spend Matters out of Azul Partners, which was dissolved so Lisa could spin out and scale MetalMiner. Then came Hackett.

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.

Pierre Mitchell laid out the logic in his own post on the deal.⁶ Hackett has deep, empirical benchmarks on the demand side: how procurement organizations perform and which capabilities, digital included, they need to transform. Spend Matters had the supply-side equivalent: how well vendors actually deliver those capabilities. Put the two together and you get a transparent, quantifiable link between a procurement team's capability gaps and the solutions that close them, plus the data to build ROI models that help self-fund the effort.

As Pierre puts it today, that opportunity still exists, but "takes a bit of work to pull off."

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.

If you came looking for Spend Matters, start here:

And if you want independent ProcureTech analysis in your inbox every week, join 15,000+ procurement professionals who read Pure Procurement.

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