By Jon Hansen | Procurement Insights | March 2026
A senior Vendor Analyst Relations executive said something recently that stopped me cold. Speaking candidly about how the industry actually works, they described Gartner’s position in the procurement technology market this way:
“Gartner in particular has relationships with almost all of our customers, midsize and up, and sometimes some of the small ones. So those customers go to Gartner either because they’re unhappy or because they are happy and they’re considering expanding or for other reasons that are adjacent or related. Gartner does have that info. They just don’t publish it.”
Read that carefully. The most complete independent record of client sentiment in the procurement technology industry — happiness, unhappiness, expansion intent, dissatisfaction — sits inside Gartner. Unpublished. Commercially filtered. Accessible only to vendors willing to maintain their position within the Gartner ecosystem.
That is not an accident. That is a model.
And Jason Busch named that model — at the vendor level — years ago: “Ariba doesn’t have customers; they have prisoners.”
It took courage to write that. It also took frustration — the kind that builds over years of watching the same structural dynamic repeat itself while the industry’s analytical infrastructure either looked the other way or actively participated in maintaining it. What neither Busch nor most of the industry has fully articulated is that the prisoner dynamic doesn’t stop at the vendor-client relationship. It runs through the entire procurement intelligence ecosystem — vendor to client, analyst firm to vendor, content ecosystem to practitioner. Three levels. One model. And a 70–80% implementation failure rate that is its most predictable output.
Three Levels. One Model.
The shackled model in procurement doesn’t operate at a single level. It operates at three — each reinforcing the others, each making that persistent failure rate not just chronic but structurally inevitable.
Level 1: Vendors shackle clients through switching costs, contractual lock-in, and the accumulated integration debt of multi-year implementations. Nico Bac documented this directly in a LinkedIn discussion that reverberated across the practitioner community — a $10 million Ariba implementation that failed, with the practitioner unable to walk away without absorbing costs that dwarfed the original investment. The technology became the prison. The contract was the cell door.
Level 2: Analyst firms shackle vendors through controlling access to client voice. The admission above captures it precisely — Gartner accumulates continuous client sentiment across hundreds of mid-size and enterprise accounts, covering unhappiness, satisfaction, expansion intent, and everything adjacent. That intelligence is never published. The implicit message to every ProcureTech vendor: stay visible in our coverage or lose your window into your own customer base. The data exists. It serves Gartner’s commercial relationships. It does not serve practitioners.
“That retreat from transparency is documented. In a recorded conversation, the same executive confirmed that outcome data — every customer’s ROI measured against their original business case, post-implementation — was once published across the entire organization. ‘Now it’s more privately held,’ she noted. The data didn’t disappear. The decision to stop sharing it was made.”
Level 3: The broader analyst and content ecosystem shackles the practitioner community through commercially filtered intelligence. In August 2024, I documented this from direct experience. Vendors told me: don’t ask too many questions. Don’t contact past or current clients — the case studies we give you should suffice. Don’t air an interview their own expert previously approved. Don’t talk to anyone other than a PR or marketing person. Don’t track implementation progress with a new client — just share the press release. Don’t talk to former senior executives.
And I was encouraged to: publish pre-written content as written. Provide interview questions in advance for approval.
This is not an allegation. It is a documented list, from direct experience, on the public record in the Procurement Insights archive. It is also, as I noted at the time, the norm — not the exception.
The Silence That Confirms Everything
Here is what the shackle model produces at the analytical level: silent watchers.
When the Hansen Fit Score™ framework and its documented findings on the capability-outcome gap are put into the market, the response from Gartner and most major analyst firms is not engagement. It is not rebuttal. It is silence.
That silence is not dismissal. Dismissal requires engagement with the evidence. What the silence actually signals is something more telling: organizations that operate through vendor-funded research and advisory relationships face structural constraints on publishing data that could destabilize those relationships. The unpublished client sentiment they hold — accumulated across hundreds of mid-size and enterprise implementations — cannot be surfaced publicly without undermining the commercial model that produced it.
That is the shackle model completing its circuit. The data exists. The data is suppressed. The cycle continues.
What Independent Performance Actually Looks Like
There is a data point I have been careful about sharing publicly, but it belongs in this conversation. In a recorded conversation, a vendor marketing executive with direct visibility into content performance metrics across analyst relationships noted that independent Procurement Insights content was generating higher practitioner engagement than analyst firm material — despite costing the vendor significantly less. The point is not price. It is what practitioners actually read, share, and act on versus what gets purchased, filed, and ignored — the difference between intelligence that serves the practitioner community and intelligence that serves the commercial ecosystem producing it.
The Archive as Evidence Outside the Model
Every other major source of procurement intelligence was built inside the shackle model, or became captured by it over time. Gartner’s data is private. Spend Matters’ coverage carries commercial relationships. Forrester’s research carries commercial relationships on both sides — vendors pay to participate in Wave evaluations and pay again to license the results for their own marketing. Logically, how many vendors would pay to license the marketing rights to a bad report?
The Procurement Insights archive operated with minimal early-stage sponsorship from 2007 — at a base rate of $250 per year, deliberately kept low so that voices weren’t restricted to those with the deepest pockets. On August 31, 2015, vendor sponsorship was formally ended, on the public record, with a documented commitment to principles of independent investigative journalism. That decision is archived and auditable. Since that date: no vendor sponsorship, no referral fees, no pre-approval of content, no restriction on who could be contacted or what could be published. To my knowledge, that combination — the longevity of the archive, the low commercial threshold even during the early years, and the documented formal transition to full independence — makes this the only longitudinal procurement intelligence record of its kind.
That independence was not always commercially rewarding. But it produced something that 18 years of commercially filtered intelligence cannot replicate: a contemporaneous record of what was actually happening in the industry — written before outcomes were known, published without commercial filter, and now available as the evidentiary foundation for the Hansen Fit Score™ framework and RAM 2025™ multimodel validation.
The Real Question for Practitioners
The shackle model persists because each party within it has a rational incentive to maintain it. Vendors need analyst coverage. Analyst firms need vendor relationships. Content creators need sponsorship. None of them have an incentive to tell practitioners about implementation failure at scale.
Practitioners, however, have every incentive to find intelligence that exists outside the model.
The issue is not that analyst firms lack insight. The issue is that the industry lacks a public evidence base connecting vendor capability claims with practitioner outcomes over time. That is the gap the Procurement Insights archive fills — not as a critique of any single firm, but as a structural response to a structural problem.
The archive is the record that those parties may never have wanted to exist — at least not publicly. However, it does exist. And the patterns it contains are now being systematically measured, validated, and published through the Hansen Fit Score™ framework and RAM 2025™ multimodel validation — without anyone’s approval, and without anyone’s permission.
That is what a public evidence base actually looks like.
Jon Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and creator of the Hansen Method™, Hansen Fit Score™, and RAM 2025™ multimodel validation framework. He has operated Procurement Insights as an independent, vendor-neutral editorial platform since 2007. All assessments and content are produced without vendor sponsorship or referral fees. Hansen Fit Score™ assessments for Coupa, SAP Ariba, and Gartner are available through Hansen Models™. The Hansen Models™ website launches the week of March 9th, 2026.
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Procurement Insights
The Procurement Intelligence Gap: Why the Industry’s Silence Speaks Louder Than Its Reports
Posted on March 6, 2026
0
By Jon Hansen | Procurement Insights | March 2026
A senior Vendor Analyst Relations executive said something recently that stopped me cold. Speaking candidly about how the industry actually works, they described Gartner’s position in the procurement technology market this way:
Read that carefully. The most complete independent record of client sentiment in the procurement technology industry — happiness, unhappiness, expansion intent, dissatisfaction — sits inside Gartner. Unpublished. Commercially filtered. Accessible only to vendors willing to maintain their position within the Gartner ecosystem.
That is not an accident. That is a model.
And Jason Busch named that model — at the vendor level — years ago: “Ariba doesn’t have customers; they have prisoners.”
It took courage to write that. It also took frustration — the kind that builds over years of watching the same structural dynamic repeat itself while the industry’s analytical infrastructure either looked the other way or actively participated in maintaining it. What neither Busch nor most of the industry has fully articulated is that the prisoner dynamic doesn’t stop at the vendor-client relationship. It runs through the entire procurement intelligence ecosystem — vendor to client, analyst firm to vendor, content ecosystem to practitioner. Three levels. One model. And a 70–80% implementation failure rate that is its most predictable output.
Three Levels. One Model.
The shackled model in procurement doesn’t operate at a single level. It operates at three — each reinforcing the others, each making that persistent failure rate not just chronic but structurally inevitable.
Level 1: Vendors shackle clients through switching costs, contractual lock-in, and the accumulated integration debt of multi-year implementations. Nico Bac documented this directly in a LinkedIn discussion that reverberated across the practitioner community — a $10 million Ariba implementation that failed, with the practitioner unable to walk away without absorbing costs that dwarfed the original investment. The technology became the prison. The contract was the cell door.
Level 2: Analyst firms shackle vendors through controlling access to client voice. The admission above captures it precisely — Gartner accumulates continuous client sentiment across hundreds of mid-size and enterprise accounts, covering unhappiness, satisfaction, expansion intent, and everything adjacent. That intelligence is never published. The implicit message to every ProcureTech vendor: stay visible in our coverage or lose your window into your own customer base. The data exists. It serves Gartner’s commercial relationships. It does not serve practitioners.
“That retreat from transparency is documented. In a recorded conversation, the same executive confirmed that outcome data — every customer’s ROI measured against their original business case, post-implementation — was once published across the entire organization. ‘Now it’s more privately held,’ she noted. The data didn’t disappear. The decision to stop sharing it was made.”
Level 3: The broader analyst and content ecosystem shackles the practitioner community through commercially filtered intelligence. In August 2024, I documented this from direct experience. Vendors told me: don’t ask too many questions. Don’t contact past or current clients — the case studies we give you should suffice. Don’t air an interview their own expert previously approved. Don’t talk to anyone other than a PR or marketing person. Don’t track implementation progress with a new client — just share the press release. Don’t talk to former senior executives.
And I was encouraged to: publish pre-written content as written. Provide interview questions in advance for approval.
This is not an allegation. It is a documented list, from direct experience, on the public record in the Procurement Insights archive. It is also, as I noted at the time, the norm — not the exception.
The Silence That Confirms Everything
Here is what the shackle model produces at the analytical level: silent watchers.
When the Hansen Fit Score™ framework and its documented findings on the capability-outcome gap are put into the market, the response from Gartner and most major analyst firms is not engagement. It is not rebuttal. It is silence.
That silence is not dismissal. Dismissal requires engagement with the evidence. What the silence actually signals is something more telling: organizations that operate through vendor-funded research and advisory relationships face structural constraints on publishing data that could destabilize those relationships. The unpublished client sentiment they hold — accumulated across hundreds of mid-size and enterprise implementations — cannot be surfaced publicly without undermining the commercial model that produced it.
That is the shackle model completing its circuit. The data exists. The data is suppressed. The cycle continues.
What Independent Performance Actually Looks Like
There is a data point I have been careful about sharing publicly, but it belongs in this conversation. In a recorded conversation, a vendor marketing executive with direct visibility into content performance metrics across analyst relationships noted that independent Procurement Insights content was generating higher practitioner engagement than analyst firm material — despite costing the vendor significantly less. The point is not price. It is what practitioners actually read, share, and act on versus what gets purchased, filed, and ignored — the difference between intelligence that serves the practitioner community and intelligence that serves the commercial ecosystem producing it.
The Archive as Evidence Outside the Model
Every other major source of procurement intelligence was built inside the shackle model, or became captured by it over time. Gartner’s data is private. Spend Matters’ coverage carries commercial relationships. Forrester’s research carries commercial relationships on both sides — vendors pay to participate in Wave evaluations and pay again to license the results for their own marketing. Logically, how many vendors would pay to license the marketing rights to a bad report?
The Procurement Insights archive operated with minimal early-stage sponsorship from 2007 — at a base rate of $250 per year, deliberately kept low so that voices weren’t restricted to those with the deepest pockets. On August 31, 2015, vendor sponsorship was formally ended, on the public record, with a documented commitment to principles of independent investigative journalism. That decision is archived and auditable. Since that date: no vendor sponsorship, no referral fees, no pre-approval of content, no restriction on who could be contacted or what could be published. To my knowledge, that combination — the longevity of the archive, the low commercial threshold even during the early years, and the documented formal transition to full independence — makes this the only longitudinal procurement intelligence record of its kind.
That independence was not always commercially rewarding. But it produced something that 18 years of commercially filtered intelligence cannot replicate: a contemporaneous record of what was actually happening in the industry — written before outcomes were known, published without commercial filter, and now available as the evidentiary foundation for the Hansen Fit Score™ framework and RAM 2025™ multimodel validation.
The Real Question for Practitioners
The shackle model persists because each party within it has a rational incentive to maintain it. Vendors need analyst coverage. Analyst firms need vendor relationships. Content creators need sponsorship. None of them have an incentive to tell practitioners about implementation failure at scale.
Practitioners, however, have every incentive to find intelligence that exists outside the model.
The issue is not that analyst firms lack insight. The issue is that the industry lacks a public evidence base connecting vendor capability claims with practitioner outcomes over time. That is the gap the Procurement Insights archive fills — not as a critique of any single firm, but as a structural response to a structural problem.
The archive is the record that those parties may never have wanted to exist — at least not publicly. However, it does exist. And the patterns it contains are now being systematically measured, validated, and published through the Hansen Fit Score™ framework and RAM 2025™ multimodel validation — without anyone’s approval, and without anyone’s permission.
That is what a public evidence base actually looks like.
Jon Hansen is the founder of Hansen Models™ and creator of the Hansen Method™, Hansen Fit Score™, and RAM 2025™ multimodel validation framework. He has operated Procurement Insights as an independent, vendor-neutral editorial platform since 2007. All assessments and content are produced without vendor sponsorship or referral fees. Hansen Fit Score™ assessments for Coupa, SAP Ariba, and Gartner are available through Hansen Models™. The Hansen Models™ website launches the week of March 9th, 2026.
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