Well, I’m sitting in the Indianapolis airport waiting for my flight back to Pittsburgh and hoping that I’ll get home in time to see at least the 3rd period of Game 3 of the NHL Eastern Confererence final (go Pens!).

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Though my presence at Iasta’s reSource conference was limited to the time allotted to my presentation, I did get to stick around to attend one breakout session. It was on the topic of multi-round eSourcing negotiations. I’m glad I attended that one.

It seems that there is a lot of struggle around the ethics and effectiveness of multi-round eSourcing negotiations vs. pure reverse auctions. I personally know that multi-round eSourcing negotiations can be both ethical and effective, but there have to be guidelines. I feel a new PurchTips topic coming on…

All in all, reSource was a very classy event. I admire the management team’s entrepreneurship as well as their accessibility to their customers. I’ve been at events where the C-levels are almost “protected” from their customers. That wasn’t the case with Iasta. A very personable, easy-going group with a lot of pride and passion.

Unfortunately, I missed some presentations regarding Iasta’s optimization capabilities. Optimization is such a cool topic in my book. It is one that had a lot of buzz in the early 2000’s, kind of lost that buzz when people realized it wasn’t for your every day, mainstream type of purchase, then seems to be regaining a buzz as more uses are found for it.