What I heard at my first IT Procurement & Sourcing Summit

I spent eight years inside Salesforce, so I know the vendor side of these negotiations well. The summit in Amsterdam on 28–29 September was a knowledge injection, adding to what we have heard and learned at SaaSed.co over the last couple of years. I listened to IT procurement, vendor management and licence management leaders from Siemens, ALDI, Air France-KLM, Fresenius, Philip Morris International and many more.

I noted six themes across the two days.

1. Data comes before the negotiation

Diana Bastians from Siemens chaired the summit, and her own talk showed the scale. Siemens outsources 80% of its IT service delivery. At one point it worked with up to thousands of providers, and IT spend in the billions.

Her first lesson was about data. Siemens now asks every team to register its IT contracts in one central place. When all the end dates are in one place, the team can build a negotiation calendar and decide what to bundle.

Veronika Zubrytskaya from Curium Pharma told a version of the same story, but she started from zero. When she joined, there was no IT procurement function. The IT asset management team did most of the procurement work, without a tool to do it in. Nearly half of the IT spend was outside the view of procurement. One of the first questions in her new model was simple: who watches the renewal calendar?

Raphael Ax from ALDI said it very bluntly. Licence data and contract data are the basis of every negotiation.

(Jean Pascal Crametz said in his session that fewer than a third of companies have a clean inventory, and one customer had a contract at amendment 116.)

2. The vendor hears one voice

Iuliana Manea from Fresenius gave the number I remember most. About 75% of a company's IT budget goes to external vendors. So vendor management sits close to most of the money, and it is more than a support function.

Big vendors always try to speak directly with the CIO. Her answer is sponsorship from the CIO, the CPO and the SVPs, so that everyone gives the same message in a negotiation.

ALDI built one front door. Its Technology Partner Office is the only route from a product owner to the market, with legal, data protection and IT security behind it. For its eight anchor vendors, which hold about 65% of the major contract value, ALDI also matches levels: CEO to CEO, CIO to CIO.

At one World Café table, a participant shared the numbers from a Microsoft renewal. It took about 145 meetings, and only 52 of them were with Microsoft. The rest were internal.

3. Define the service before the vendor does

Pawel Hawliczek from Philip Morris International started with a familiar scene. An IT stakeholder comes to procurement and asks for a new supplier. His question was: what if the supplier is not the problem?

Three large managed services contracts expired at the same time, but his team did not start with the market. First, they built a service taxonomy, an inventory of 2,000 applications and their own commercial model. Then the vendors bid against that.

The questions from the vendors showed the gaps in the runbooks, the inventory and the model. The team closed those gaps before they signed the contract. Vendors said it was the best-prepared RFP in their experience.

In the contract, automation must lower the unit price every year. After 12 months, the new model covers about 40% of the application estate, up from 25%. His summary: you cannot transform what you cannot describe.

ALDI had a related problem. Its product teams plan every quarter, but its service contracts had a fixed scope for years.

4. Resilience has a price

Siemens limits the volume per provider, and it keeps challengers next to its strategic partners. A second source costs money. In Diana's view, the cost is worth it, because without competition your position in a negotiation is weak. She called resilience the new return on investment.

For the long tail of providers, Siemens also chose not to force the change from the top. The team works with a coalition of the willing and uses the results to convince the rest.

5. AI is a readiness problem first

Martin Bacigál from Nouryon opened with a question. Would you give a new hire with two PhDs the right to sign contracts on day one? Some companies plan to do the same with AI agents.

Four in five procurement organisations have no concrete plan for agents. In his view, the bottleneck is readiness, data and context, more than the technology. Pilots fail for simple reasons: no budget, no record of how the last RFP ran, and no clear data owner. Negotiation, judgement and supplier relationships stay human.

Ricardo A. Velásquez from Etex showed what AI could do. An agent puts every vendor answer into one standard template, with credit score, sustainability score, security assessment and TCO over three to five years. Etex estimates that one RFx now takes about 320 minutes instead of about 60 hours.

He was open about the limits. They are only at the beginning of this journey, and a person always makes every final decision.

The cost side came from Gustav from Inverto. The price per token falls, but the total AI bill rises. And in the World Café summaries, the hosts reported that most organisations have no process to forecast their AI use.

6. People make it work

Diana said that without people, a strategy is only paper. You have to talk about it, and then talk about it again.

Veronika's team communicated two to three times a week during the change. Her advice was to define the boundaries first, keep governance simple, and not wait for perfection.

Upasana Gurnani and her team have, over the last 2.5 years, moved supplier reviews from opinion to data and tool-based tracking with an annual 180-degree survey and a quarterly dashboard. The goal is making progress through transparency, not blame. In regular alignment with the vendor managers, suppliers also bring their own issues to the table.

It was two great days. Thank you to we.CONECT for the event, and to every speaker who shared their work so openly. (And to everyone who came to karaoke at Duke of Tokyo!)