Kirit Pandit is Vice President of Content Strategy and Head of Product Management for the Spend Analysis and Compliance Solution of Emptoris, Inc. He has over a dozen years experience working to design and elicit value from procurement processes to enable better spend visibility and savings opportunity analysis. Kirit joined Emptoris in early 2005 when Emptoris acquired Intigma where he was CEO and co-founder. Kirit founded Intigma in 2000 with a single vision -- to automate the conversion of toxic ERP content sources into valuable repositories of structured information that enable all decision support systems including Supplier Relationship Management (SRM). In 2004, Intigma was providing Spend Data Management services to 4 of the top 6 Spend Analysis providers. In addition to holding the CEO office, Kirit played important roles in product management, key customer and channel relationships, and governance and financing efforts. Prior to starting Intigma, Kirit spent four years in Deloitte Consulting as a Manager, where he consulted with F-500 companies and implemented Supply Chain Optimization and eProcurement solutions. Prior to Deloitte, Kirit spend 6 years in National Instruments as a Dir. Design Engineer, where he developed cutting edge products for the test and measurement industry. He is credited with designing the smallest data acquisition PC card for the T&M industry in 1995. Kirit has published numerous papers in scientific and business journals and is a sought-after speaker at investor and industry forums. In 2006, he was given the ~Pro to Know' award by Supply and Demand Chain Magazine. Kirit holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, an M.S in Electrical Engineering, as well as M.B.A. from the University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Haralambos Marmanis is Director of Research, and chief architect of Emptoris' Spend Analysis and Compliance Applications. He has worked on the design and implementation of: network protocols; cardiovascular flow simulations; Micro-Electro Mechanical Systems (MEMS); trading applications; electronic marketplaces; supply management, and spend analysis. For the last 7 years, Dr. Marmanis' work has been related to the application of machine learning and data mining techniques in the analysis of transactions for the purpose of identifying spending risks, savings opportunities, vendor consolidation, state and federal compliance, and contract optimization. Emptoris was, in 2004, the recipient of the INFORMS Franz Edelman award; Dr. Marmanis received also the Sigma Xi Outstanding Research Award, and his work was on the cover page of "Visualization '99" and the Centennial volume of IEEE. His work has been supported by the National Science Foundation. He holds a Ph.D. degree in Applied Mathematics from Brown University, a [...]. degree in Theoretical and Applied Mechanics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, a [...]. and a [...]. degree in Civil Engineering from the Aristotle University of Thessalonica. Dr. Marmanis is the author of numerous publications in peer reviewed international scientific journals, conferences, as well as technical periodicals.