Organizations use a combination of tools, general ledger tracking, expense management systems, and business intelligence reporting - along with corporate procurement policies to track and manage costs. Analytic applications can bring this information together with context to provide greater insight, and spend analytics software is emerging as a tool for operational decision making to not only manage costs but also optimize procurement processes. Indeed, IDC estimates that the worldwide revenue for performance management analytic applications - a category that includes spend analytics - will have a compound annual growth rate of more than 10% from 2006 to 2012.

Kathleen Wilhide, research director of IDC’s Compliance and Business Performance Management Solutions program, answers a set of questions in this white paper relating to performance management analytic applications.